Penn State University Press: 456 books
The Continuity of the Conquest
Charlemagne and Anglo-Norman Imperialism
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2016
The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and...
Masquerade and Gender
Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women
Language: English
Release Date: October 20, 1993
Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele,...
by Catherine E. Léglu
Language: English
Release Date: June 18, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: June 18, 2010
The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that...
Adventures in Paradox
Don Quixote and the Western Tradition
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2001
Cervantes’s Don Quixote confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: Does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth...
Seditious Allegories
John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2001
The multifaceted career of John Thelwall (1764-1834)—poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, politician, scientist—is the lens through which we are offered here a new look at the phenomenon of British Jacobinism, long distorted by the critical view of it as intellectually weak bequeathed to us...
by James F. Burke
Language: English
Release Date: December 23, 2000
Language: English
Release Date: December 23, 2000
The plot of the late-medieval Spanish work Celestina (1499) centers on the ill-fated love of Calisto and Melibea and the fascinating character of their intermediary, Celestina. In this ground-breaking rereading of the play, James F. Burke offers a new interpretation of the characters' actions by analyzing...
The Duplicating Imagination
Twain and the Twain Papers
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Maria Marotti applies a unique mixture of strains of contemporary literary theory to the body of posthumously published works so far published in the Mark Twain Papers series, examining these late, frequently incomplete or abandoned, and usually experimental, works in theoretical light.
Marotti's...
Reconstructing Woman
From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2008
Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired...
by Thomas Kulka
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 1996
What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to...
The Vienna School of Art History
Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2013
Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence...
by Andrew R. Casper
Language: English
Release Date: January 29, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 29, 2014
Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best...
Among the Bone Eaters
Encounters with Hyenas in Harar
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 2015
Biologists studying large carnivores in wild places usually do so from a distance, using telemetry and noninvasive methods of data collection. So what happens when an anthropologist studies a clan of spotted hyenas, Africa’s second-largest carnivores, up close—and in a city of a hundred thousand...
Living Poetically
Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 1994
Living Poetically is the first book to focus primarily on Kierkegaard's existential aesthetics as opposed to traditional aesthetic features of his writings such as the use of pseudonyms, literary techniques and figures, and literary criticism. Living Poetically traces the development of the concept...
Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires
Encounters and Confluences
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2017
The cross-cultural exchange of ideas that flourished in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly affected European and Islamic society. Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires considers the role and place of gardens and landscapes in the broader context...