Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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Examines theater and portraiture as interrelated social practices in seventeenth-century Spain. Features visual images and cross-disciplinary readings of selected plays that employ the motif of the painted portrait to key dramatic and symbolic effect.
Explores the relationship of the life and work of Alexis de Toqueville (1805-1859) to modern feminisms, especially as they pertain to the analysis of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and colonialism.
Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel
A discussion of the murals by Giotto in the Arena Chapel of Padua, Italy. The artist's work is considered in terms of its relationship to the structure of the poetry of Dante, biblical exegesis, geometry, and symmetry.
Examines patterns of income inequality among 16 advanced democracies from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s and explains why some societies have a large and growing divide between the rich and the poor while others, facing similar global economic pressures, maintain more egalitarian income distributions.
Explores the role played by technocrats in the political and institutional evolution of Chile since the late nineteenth century until today, with emphasis on the period from 1938-1973 as well as the period following democratic restoration in 1990.
Blacks of the Rosary tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian communities that developed within lay religious brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais. It shows how these brotherhoods functioned as a social space in which Africans and their descendants could rebuild a communal identity based on a shared history of ......
Feminism, Subjectivity, and the Angel of the House in the Latin American Novel, 1887-1903
An historical and theoretical literary study of three Latin American women writers, Refugio Barragán of Mexico, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera of Peru, and Ana Roqué of Puerto Rico. Examines how these novelists subversively rewrote womanhood vis à vis the prescribed comportment for women during a conservative ......
Feminism, Subjectivity, and the Angel of the House in the Latin American Novel, 1887-1903
An historical and theoretical literary study of three Latin American women writers, Refugio Barragán of Mexico, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera of Peru, and Ana Roqué of Puerto Rico. Examines how these novelists subversively rewrote womanhood vis à vis the prescribed comportment for women during a conservative ......
