Penn State University Press: 456 books
The Transformations of Magic
Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2013
In this original, provocative, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented book, Frank Klaassen proposes that two principal genres of illicit learned magic occur in late medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic (in its extreme form,...
After Identity
Mennonite Writing in North America
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2015
For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity interrogates this prolonged preoccupation and explores the potential to move beyond it to a truly post-identity Mennonite literature.
The twelve essays collected here view...
Empathy and Democracy
Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2010
Democracy harbors within it fundamental tensions between the ideal of giving everyone equal consideration and the reality of having to make legitimate, binding collective decisions. Democracies have granted political rights to more groups of people, but formal rights have not always guaranteed equal...
by Robert J. Yanal
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 1999
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 1999
How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed...
by Shawn J. Parry-Giles, David S. Kaufer
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2017
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats who advocated conflicting visions of American citizenship could agree on one thing: the rhetorical power of Abraham Lincoln’s life. This volume examines the debates over his legacy and their impact on America’s future.
In the...
Sacred Estrangement
The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 1993
Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the "rhetoric of conversion." Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, "conversion"...
Genius Envy
Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801–1900
Language: English
Release Date: January 24, 2017
In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.”...
Territories of History
Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America
Language: English
Release Date: January 26, 2008
Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal...
Bound to Differ
The Dynamics of Theological Discourses
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 1992
In this analysis of theological conflict, Wesley Kort treats theologies as discourses that generate power and significance by their relations to and differences from one another. He identifies the traditional or putative claims of theological power and meaning—sources, referents, and patterns or...
by Carl Page
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 1995
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 1995
The recent emergence, among philosophers, of the view that the activity of human reason in all its possible modes must also be historicized, including the activity of philosophizing itself, may be found in writers as diverse as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre....
Gothic Feminism
The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 1998
As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler...
The Rhetorics of US Immigration
Identity, Community, Otherness
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2015
In the current geopolitical climate—in which unaccompanied children cross the border in record numbers, and debates on the topic swing violently from pole to pole—the subject of immigration demands innovative inquiry. In The Rhetorics of US Immigration, some of the most prominent and prolific...
by Philippe de Remi
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2010
Philippe de Remi (1200/1210–65) holds a remarkable position in the legacy of the thirteenth-century literary world. A layman, landholder, and professional administrator, rather than a court poet or member of the clergy, Philippe de Remi wrote poems, songs, and long verse narratives that were grounded...
by Burton Raffel
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
Language: English
Release Date: October 22, 1990
This book by a well-known translator and critic is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the linguistic and other more technical aspects of translating poetry, the second involved with more practice-oriented matters. The chapters in Part One examine the specific constraints of language and...