Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London
William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a ......
At the Intersection of the Mesopotamian Technical Disciplines and Their Clients
The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients and, in doing ......
Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel
In this book, Octavio R. Gonzálezrevisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which ......
In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.
Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write ......
In the summer of 1876, Berlin anxiously awaited the arrival of what was billed as the most gigantic ape known to zoology. Described by European explorers only a few decades earlier, gorillas had rarely been seen outside of Africa, and emerging theories of evolution only increased the public's desire to see this monster with human features. ......
Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era
In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a contraband guide, a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan ......
Out in Central Pennsylvania tells the unique and relatively unknown story of the LGBTQ community in central Pennsylvania. Drawing from oral histories and historical documents, this book describes how gender and sexual minorities built community and social networks in a culturally conservative region. ......
The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (19222008) is best known for abstract, large-format works produced using pliage: the painting of a crumpled, gathered, or systematically pleated canvas that the artist then unfolds and stretches for exhibition. In her study of this profoundly influential artist, Molly Warnock presents a ......
Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy
Titian, one of the most successful painters of the Italian Renaissance, was credited by his contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image, the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross. Taking this unusual circumstance as a point of departure, Christopher J. Nygren revisits the scope and impact of Titian's life's work. Nygren shows ......
