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.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
Excavations at the Early Bronze Age Townsite in Jordan, 1977-1983
This volume presents the resultsof archeological research atthe Early Bronze Age sites ofNumayra and Ras an-Numayra,conducted to investigate therise of Early Bronze Age urbansociety with a distinctive focuson links between environmentaland social systems.
The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope towards the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of ......
This book challenges the notion that Michelangelo, renowned for his magnificent portrayals of the human body, was merely concerned with superficial anatomythat is, the parts of the body that can be seen from the outside. Christian K. Kleinbub provides a fresh perspective on Michelangelo's art of the human figure by investigating what he ......
Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self
Western culture is in a moment when wholly new kinds of personal transformations are possible, but authentic transformation requires both personal testimony and public recognition. In this book, Adam Ellwanger takes a distinctly rhetorical approach to analyzing how the personal and the public relate to an individual's transformation and ......
The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire
In 1786, Guatemalan priest Pedro José de Arrese published a work instructing readers on their duty to perform the cesarean operation on the bodies of recently deceased pregnant women in order to extract the fetus while it was still alive. Although the fetus's long-term survival was desired, the overarching goal was to cleanse the unborn child ......
Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance
Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient ......
Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue - a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine any sounds the statue might make - Sculpted Ears rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on ......
Found in two thirds of the world, rabies is a devastating infectious disease with no effective cure once symptoms appear and a 99.9 percent case-fatality rate. Rabies in the Streets tells the compelling story of the relationship between people, street animals, and rabies in urban India, where one third of human ......
Culturally powerful ideas of normalcy and deviation, individual responsibility, and what is medically feasible shape the ways in which we live with illness and disability. The essays in this volume show how illness narratives expressed in a variety of formsbiographical essays, fictional texts, cartoons, graphic novels, and comicsreflect on ......