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.
The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry
A study of ancient Rome as a prominent topic in the works of Middle English poets. Discusses how each these poets conceives of ancient Rome and Romans, both pagan and Christian, and why it matters to their work. Includes the works of Gower, Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate.
Explores the uses of Shakespeare in Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the 1890s to 1920s, as part of a cultural exchange among non-Anglo and Anglo-identified groups, intermingling different communities’ ideas about what Shakespeare, race, and national belonging should and could mean for Americans.
In this book, Jeffery Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents—many of which are published or translated here for the first time—that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. ......
Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction
Love in a Time of Slaughtersexamines a diverse array of creative narratives in which genocide and extinction blur species lines in order to show how such stories can promote the preservation of biological and cultural diversity in a time of man-made threats to species survival.
Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue.
Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry ......
Djuna Barnes once said that there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object, and the statement is provocative when considering her own writing and art. Arriving as an accomplished writer and journalist in 1920s Paris, Barnes produced an eclectic body of work whose objects and surfaces continue to fascinate readers. In ......
As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. In this dynamic book, Vivien Green Fryd charts this decades-long radical intervention through an ......
In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography's vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise ......
Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues.
