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.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that have often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves ......
In The Building in the Text, Roy Eriksen shows that Renaissance writers conceived of their texts in accordance with architectural principles. His approach opens the way to wide-ranging discussions of the structure and meaning of a variety of literary texts and also provides new insights into the famed architectural ekphrases of Alberti ......
Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy
Interweaving past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s sense) with philosophical thinkers today who share his interest in the relationship of interpretation to ethics and whose ideas can ......
With special reference to conference translation from French and Spanish
This handbook introduces general principles of translation while focusing on translating French and Spanish into English within a conference setting. General principles are elucidated in an introduction, in a postlude entitled "The Elements of Good Translation," and throughout the French and Spanish parts.
Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England
Long neglected as a marginal and eccentric figure, Thomas Hoccleve (1367–1426) wrote some of the most sophisticated and challenging poetry of the late Middle Ages. Full of gossip and autobiographical detail, his work has made him immensely useful to modern scholars, yet Hoccleve the poet has remained decidedly in the shadow of Geoffrey ......
Emil Staiger (1908–1987), a native of Switzerland, was one of the foremost scholars in the field of literary studies. Grundbegriffe der Poetik is a monument in the history of literary criticism that has been unavailable to the English reader until now. Of Staiger's works, Poetics is probably the most radical, the most ......
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) has been acclaimed as the quintessential puritan of eighteenth-century America who defined not only what Puritanism was, but also what American Christianity would become. Anri Morimoto finds that Edwards's theology, once regarded as disarrayed, precarious, and dangerously unorthodox, is in fact consistent and ......
Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition examines representative texts and the theories of realism upon which they are based. It studies the foundations of these theories in the philosophies of language contemporaneous with them. Beginning with Adamicism, Mack Smith looks at the way humanist, rationalist, empiricist, Kantian, ......
Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic
The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England ......
