Penn State University Press: 456 books
Listening, Thinking, Being
Toward an Ethics of Attunement
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2014
Although listening is central to human interaction, its importance is often ignored. In the rush to speak and be heard, it is easy to neglect listening and disregard its significance as a way of being with others and the world. Drawing upon insights from phenomenology, linguistics, philosophy of communication,...
“I Don’t See Color”
Personal and Critical Perspectives on White Privilege
Language: English
Release Date: March 17, 2015
Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak...
Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double
The Rhythms of Audience Response
Language: English
Release Date: September 2, 1991
Why does Shakespearean tragedy continue to move spectators even though Elizabethan philosophical assumptions have faded from belief? Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double seeks answers in the moment-by-moment dynamics of performance and response, and the Shakespearean text signals those possibilities.
Shakespearean...
Rousseau Among the Moderns
Music, Aesthetics, Politics
Language: English
Release Date: June 6, 2013
Renowned for his influence as a political philosopher, a writer, and an autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is known also for his lifelong interest in music. He composed operas and other musical pieces, invented a system of numbered musical notation, engaged in public debates about music, and wrote...
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine
Volume 1: The Fratricides
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2010
This is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in...
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine
Volume 2: Bajazet
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 2011
This is the second volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered...
by Philip F. Gura
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 1996
The Crossroads of American History and Literature collects two decades' worth of the best-known essays of Philip F. Gura. Beginning with a definitive overview of studies of colonial literature, Gura ranges through such subjects in colonial American history as the intellectual life of the Connecticut...
Reading Shaver’s Creek
Ecological Reflections from an Appalachian Forest
Language: English
Release Date: March 9, 2018
What does it mean to know a place? What might we learn about the world by returning to the same place year after year? What would a long-term record of such visits tell us about change and permanence and our place in the natural world? This collection explores these and related questions through a...
The Athenian Republic
Democracy of the Rule of Law?
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
This book traces continuity in the development of the Athenian constitution, whereas previous studies have usually looked for catastrophic changes. Sealey selects three features of Athenian law which are important for the structure of society and the location of authority: (1) the legal status, and...
Poetic Remaking
The Art of Browning, Yeats, and Pound
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
This volume offers a coherent view of post-romantic poetic development through selective examples both of individual poems and of poetic influence. Bornstein focuses most centrally on Browning in the Victorian period and Yeats and Pound in the Modern, but also looks more briefly at works by Wordsworth,...
Literary Translation in Russia
A Cultural History
Language: English
Release Date: January 28, 1997
In this rich historical study, Maurice Friedberg recounts the impact of translation on the Russian literary process. In tracing the explosion of literary translation in nineteenth-century Russia, Friedberg determines that it introduced new issues of cultural, aesthetic, and political values.
Beginning...
The Bernward Gospels
Art, Memory, and the Episcopate in Medieval Germany
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2014
Few works of art better illustrate the splendor of eleventh-century painting than the manuscript often referred to as the “precious gospels” of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim, with its peculiar combination of sophistication and naïveté, its dramatically gesturing figures, and the saturated colors...
by Brian Johnston
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one...
Rhapsody of Philosophy
Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 2009
This book proposes to rethink the relationship between philosophy and literature through an engagement with Plato’s dialogues. The dialogues have been seen as the source of a long tradition that subordinates poetry to philosophy, but they may also be approached as a medium for understanding how...