University Of Pennsylvania Press Inc : 784 books
Fanny Kemble
A Performed Life
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2013
A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007
Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite...
The Performance of Self
Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2012
Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast...
The Romance of Adultery
Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2013
Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within the broader cultural debate about the institution of queenship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France.
Moving...
by Horace
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2012
The Roman philosopher and dramatic critic Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.), known in English as Horace, was also the most famous lyric poet of his age. Written in the troubled decade ending with the establishment of Augustus's regime, his Satires provide trenchant social commentary on men's perennial...
by Pamela Regis
Language: English
Release Date: August 31, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: August 31, 2013
The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create...
by William H. Galperin
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2013
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Jane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all English novelists, has been regarded both as a feminist ahead of her time and as a social conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate rather than to liberate. Such viewpoints,...
Political Gastronomy
Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
"The table constitutes a kind of tie between the bargainer and the bargained-with, and makes the diners more willing to receive certain impressions, to submit to certain influences: from this is born political gastronomy. Meals have become a means of governing, and the fate of whole peoples is...
Ways of Writing
The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2012
Writers abounded in seventeenth-century New England. From the moment of colonization and constantly thereafter, hundreds of people set pen to paper in the course of their lives, some to write letters that others recopied, some to compose sermons as part of their life work as ministers, dozens to attempt...
Stuyvesant Bound
An Essay on Loss Across Time
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2013
Stuyvesant Bound is an innovative and compelling evaluation of the last director general of New Netherland. Donna Merwick examines the layers of culture in which Peter Stuyvesant forged his career and performed his responsibilities, ultimately reappraising the view of Stuyvesant long held by the majority...
Against Self-Reliance
The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2015
Individualism is arguably the most vital tenet of American national identity: American cultural heroes tend to be mavericks and nonconformists, and independence is the fulcrum of the American origin story. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of American artists, writers,...
Theatrical Nation
Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain
Language: English
Release Date: May 22, 2012
Perhaps the most significant development of the Georgian theater was its multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types parading across the stage. In Theatrical Nation, Michael Ragussis opens up an archive of neglected plays and performances to examine how this flood of domestic...
Selling the American Way
U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention...
Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale
Selections and Commentaries
Language: English
Release Date: September 3, 2013
Florence Nightingale is best known as the founder of modern nursing, a reformer in the field of public health, and a pioneer in the use of statistics. It is not generally known, however, that Nightingale was at the forefront of the religious, philosophical, and scientific though of her time. In a...
Reading Children
Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America
Language: English
Release Date: May 2, 2016
What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's...