Penn State University Press: 456 books
The Politics of the Book
A Study on the Materiality of Ideas
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2019
It is impossible to separate the content of a book from its form. In this study, Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Brito Vieira expand our understanding of the history of social and political scholarship by examining how the entirety of a book mediates and constitutes meaning in ways that affect...
Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty
Dreams, Disenchantments, and Diversity
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2006
Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the...
Man or Citizen
Anger, Forgiveness, and Authenticity in Rousseau
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2015
The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen, Karen Pagani expands,...
The Impossible Craft
Literary Biography
Language: English
Release Date: March 24, 2015
In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage...
Imperfect Oracle
The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2009
Science and its offshoot, technology, enter into the very fabric of our society in so many ways that we cannot imagine life without them. We are surrounded by crises and debates over climate change, stem-cell research, AIDS, evolutionary theory and “intelligent design,” the use of DNA in solving...
Aging Across the United States
Matching Needs to States’ Differing Opportunities and Services
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2010
Older Americans experience stages of aging with distinct priorities. For younger retirees, climate can be most important; for older retirees, quality of health care. Various states support these and other priorities to sharply different degrees. While many Americans know which states offer mild climates...
Reconstructing Rawls
The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2011
Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based...
by Ralph W. Condee
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 1991
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 1991
Milton's skill in constructing poems whose structure is determined, not by rule or precedent, but by the thought to be expressed, is one of his chief accomplishments as a creative artist. Professor Condee analyzes seventeen of Milton's poems, both early and late, well and badly organized, in order...
Infertility
Tracing the History of a Transformative Term
Language: English
Release Date: October 31, 2016
This book explores the arguments, appeals, and narratives that have defined the meaning of infertility in the modern history of the United States and Europe.
Throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that women are individually...
Toward a Humean True Religion
Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and Practical Morality
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 2015
David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of...
Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel
Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie
Language: English
Release Date: September 24, 1993
Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel focuses on the novels of R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie and explores the tension in these novels between ideology and the generic fictive strategies that shape ideology or are shaped by it. Fawzia Afzal-Khan raises...
by Dick Blau, Nigel Rothfels
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2015
In Elephant House, photographer Dick Blau and historian Nigel Rothfels offer a thought-provoking study of the Oregon Zoo’s Asian Elephant Building and the daily routines of its residents—human and pachyderm alike. Without an agenda beyond a desire to build a deeper understanding of this enigmatic...
by Denise Schaeffer
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2014
In Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens’ passions in order to promote republican virtue and unreflective patriotism. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau’s central concern...
Magic in the Modern World
Strategies of Repression and Legitimization
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2017
This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an...