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.
A Reconsideration of Hermann Gunkel's Chaoskampf Hypothesis
Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of ......
From bears on the Renaissance stage to the equine pageantry of the nineteenth-century hunt, animals have been used in human-orchestrated entertainments throughout history. The essays in this volume present an array of case studies that inspire new ways of interpreting animal performance and the role of animal agency in the performing ......
Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800
A narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Examines the intersection of literary and national imagination through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar.
Explores the life and work of political publicist and strategist Esther DeBerdt Reed, who, in a life highly structured by conflict, national identity, religion, and the overall importance of being a wife and mother, gave eloquent expression to the political aspirations of female patriots in Revolutionary America.
Self-Representation and the Bible in John Milton's Writings
In Milton and the Parables of Jesus, David V. Urban examines Milton’s self-referential use of figures from the New Testament parables in his works of poetry and prose.
Urban’s informative introduction explores the history of parable interpretation and the writings of the Reformed sixteenth- and ......
In this volume, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro expand on the exploration begun in their last book, Wild Art, which featured art that stands outside the margins of the art world in the way that wild animals stand apart from domestic cats and dogs. This new collaboration delves further into explaining how “wild art” came ......
Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond
This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and Northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and ......
Examines how French Renaissance travelers consumed and represented Italian space through writing and the imagination. Includes writings by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Du Bellay as well as lesser-known French travelers, illustrating how the material and imaginative aspects of travel joined to form a space of desire in the French ......
A Small Radius of Light maps the territory artist G. Daniel Massad has explored for almost four decades. After earning degrees in English at Princeton and the University of Chicago and working for a time as a psychotherapist, Massad made the decision to pursue graduate work in painting in 1979. Two years later, while working on his MFA ......
