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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Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock
A rhetorical study of the American political debate on gun violence and gun policy. Examines the role of public memory in shaping this discourse and its eventual policy outcomes.
There is no “Book of Sarah” in the Bible, so artist Sarah Lightman sets out to make her own. In this quietly subversive graphic autobiography, Lightman follows the urge to find herself in the midst of training to become an artist, observing her faith, navigating family and romantic relationships, and learning to be a ......
An Inner-Biblical Interpretation of Ezekiel's Recognition Formula
The recognition formula, “you/they shall know that I am Yahweh,” is repeated more than seventy times in the book of Ezekiel. And yet, surprisingly, this refrain has not been analyzed in detail in recent research. In this study, John F. Evans attempts to uncover the literary and theological intent of the recognition formula in ......
This is the second and final volume of scientific and interdisciplinary reports on the excavations and research conducted at Tell el-Borg, north Sinai, between 1998 and 2008, written by the scholars and specialists who worked on the site under the direction of Professor James K. Hoffmeier.
This volume focuses on the cemetery areas, which ......
Since the 1980s, projects such as the State Archives of Assyria have made great strides in the philological study of Neo-Assyrian inscriptional sources, producing text editions and hand-copies of administrative and legal texts, letters, religious and literary works, and royal and private commemorative inscriptions with a high standard of ......
Explores Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period. Analyzes her creative engagement with contemporary religious controversies and uncovers a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.
Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century
This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways.
Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English ......
Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a ......
Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the ......