Bücher veröffentlicht von Pennsylvania State University Press

An alphabetical guide to the deities of ancient Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. Discusses each deity's symbolism and imagery its connection to myths, rituals, and festivals described in texts.

An English translation, with accompanying introduction, commentary, and notes, of the medieval treatise on astrological magic known as Picatrix, a guide for constructing magical talismans, mixing magical compounds, summoning planetary spirits, and determining astrological conditions.

Explores the life and work of historian Edward Gibbon, and his complex relationship with Christianity, through an examination of his correspondence, private journals, early works, and unfinished memoirs.

Explores the search for religious meaning during World War I and the wide range of spiritual responses that emerged across boundaries. Examines how religious experience and battle experience were intertwined.

Explores Rene Girard's mimetic theory and repurposes it to invent a post-Christian "theorhetoric," a new way of speaking to, for, and especially about God. Advocates a rhetoric of meekness that conscientiously refuses rivalry, actively exploits tradition through complicit invention, and boldly seeks a holiness free of exclusionary violence.

"Investigates how the mineral mining company Rio Tinto constructs rhetorical personae in the places it operates and transforms environments, communities, and entire landscapes"--

Located at the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River, Shamokin was a significant historical settlement in the region that became Pennsylvania. By the time the Moravians arrived to set up a mission in the 1740s, Shamokin had been a site of intertribal commerce and refuge for the Native peoples of Pennsylvania for several centuries. It served first as a Susquehannock, then a Shawnee, and then a primarily Lenape settlement and trading post, overseen by the Oneida leader and diplomat Shikellamy. Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence is an annotated translation of the diaries documenting the Moravian mission to the area. Unlike other missions of the time, the Moravians at Shamokin integrated their work and daily life into the diverse cultures they encountered, demonstrating an unusual compromise between the Church's missionary impetus and the needs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. The diaries counter the dominant vision of the area around Shamokin as a sinister place, revealing instead a nexus of vibrant cultural exchange where women and men speaking Lenape, Mohican, English, and German collaborated in the business of survival at a pivotal time.The Shamokin diaries, which until now existed only in manuscript form in difficult-to-read German script in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, allow today's readers to experience the Susquehanna confluence and the rich intercultural exchanges that took place there between Europeans and Native Americans.

"Explores the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, and how it was intertwined with a complex history of colonialism and racism"--

Explores the transformative shift in nineteenth-century Chinese art, where artists used touch to establish a genuine connection with the past, challenge stagnant artistic norms, and foster deeper human connections.

Reassesses the genre of epideictic rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance by looking at a series of texts that exploit the potential of praise to undermine consensus and to challenge the normative values of society. The authors covered range from Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Erasmus, Machiavelli, and Montaigne

"Science in fiction," "geek novels," "lab-lit"-whatever one calls them, a new generation of science novels has opened a space in which the reading public can experience and think about the powers of science to illuminate nature as well as to generate and mitigate social change and risks. Under the Literary Microscope examines the implications of the discourse taking place in and around this creative space.Exploring works by authors as disparate as Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers, Ian McEwan, Ann Patchett, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Crichton, these essays address the economization of scientific institutions; ethics, risk, and gender disparity in scientific work; the reshaping of old stereotypes of scientists; science in an evolving sci-fi genre; and reader reception and potential contributions of the novels to public understandings of science.Under the Literary Microscope illuminates the new ways in which fiction has been grappling with scientific issues-from climate change and pandemics to artificial intelligence and genomics-and makes a valuable addition to both contemporary literature and science studies courses.In addition to the editors, the contributors include Anna Auguscik, Jay Clayton, Carol Colatrella, Sonja Fücker, Raymond Haynes, Luz María Hernández Nieto, Emanuel Herold, Karin Hoepker, Anton Kirchhofer, Antje Kley, Natalie Roxburgh, Uwe Schimank, Sherryl Vint, and Peter Weingart.

Investigates an incident of holy relic theft in Rome, the lengthy legal case that followed it, and the larger questions that surrounded saints' remains in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe.

Louisa Siefert was a prolific poet, critic, playwright, and novelist who published many works that were bestsellers in nineteenth-century France. This bilingual critical edition of Siefert's Les Stoïques (1870) aims to restore Louisa Siefert's intellectual legacy while providing ample material for further scholarship on her unique poetic voice. Siefert's intellectual power and aesthetic originality are especially pronounced in her Les Stoïques, a volume that exemplifies her transdisciplinary mind and rich sonnet practice. The more than forty poems collected here are presented in the original French with masterful translations into English by Norman R. Shapiro, one of the most highly regarded English translators of French poetry. Shapiro's inspired translations of Siefert's texts give readers gain a sense of her prosodic mastery and flair as well as the way she uses poetry to think about the relation between mind and body. In her introduction, Adrianna M. Paliyenko reconstructs from original archival research the reception of Les Stoïques from May 1870 to the present, describing how many nineteenth-century readers considered Siefert's philosophical verse to be central to her contribution to French poetic history and, in turn, how the gendering of poetic expression and the canon sidelined Siefert's intellectual accomplishment.A monumental achievement, this book brings the work of a major French poet to a broader audience. Siefert's poetic primer on the Stoic way of thinking about why humans suffer or find serenity and joy, and other big questions of life, will strike a chord with modern readers.

In Show Me Where It Hurts, Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography-long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired-re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject.Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression.Pathbreaking and provocative, this book will appeal to scholars and students of the medical humanities, comics studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and women and gender studies.

Democracy is venerated in US political culture, in part because it is our democracy. As a result, we assume that the government and institutions of the United States represent the true and right form of democracy, needed by all. This volume challenges this commonplace belief by putting US politics in the context of the Americas more broadly. Seeking to cultivate conversations among and between the hemispheres, this collection examines local political rhetorics across the Americas. The contributors-scholars of communication from both North and South America-recognize democratic ideals as irreducible to a single national perspective and reflect on the ways social minorities in the Western Hemisphere engage in unique political discourses. The essays consider current rhetorics in the United States on American exceptionalism, immigration, citizenship, and land rights alongside current cultural and political events in Latin America, such as corruption in Guatemala, women's activism in Ciudad Juárez, representation in Venezuela, and media bias in Brazil. Through a survey of these rhetorics, this volume provides a broad analysis of democracy. It highlights institutional and cultural differences in the Americas and presents a hemispheric democracy that is both more pluralistic and more agonistic than what is believed about the system in the United States.In addition to the editors, the contributors include José Cortez, Linsay M. Cramer, Pamela Flores, Alberto González, Amy N. Heuman, Christa J. Olson, Carlos Piovezani, Clara Eugenia Rojas Blanco, Abraham Romney, René Agustín de los Santos, and Alejandra Vitale.

Investigates the links between religion, empire, and the study of nature across the Spanish world during a period of Iberian global expansion, showing how geographies, cosmographies, and natural history were used to advance multiple Catholic goals.

This collection investigates the world of nineteenth-century Quaker women, bringing to light the issues and challenges Quaker women experienced and the dynamic ways in which they were active agents of social change, cultural contestation, and gender transgression in the nineteenth century.New research illuminates the complexities of Quaker testimonies of equality, slavery, and peace and how they were informed by questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. The essays in this volume challenge the view that Quaker women were always treated equally with men and that people of color were welcomed into white Quaker activities. The contributors explore how diverse groups of Quaker women navigated the intersection of their theological positions and social conventions, asking how they challenged and supported traditional ideals of gender, race, and class. In doing so, this volume highlights the complexity of nineteenth-century Quakerism and the ways Quaker women put their faith to both expansive and limiting ends. Reaching beyond existing national studies focused solely on white American or British Quaker women, this interdisciplinary volume presents the most current research, providing a necessary and foundational resource for scholars, libraries, and universities.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Joan Allen, Richard C. Allen, Stephen W. Angell, Jennifer M. Buck, Nancy Jiwon Cho, Isabelle Cosgrave, Thomas D. Hamm, Julie L. Holcomb, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Linda Palfreeman, Hannah Rumball, and Janet Scott.

Almost one hundred years have passed since Walter Lippmann and John Dewey published their famous reflections on the "problems of the public," but their thoughts remain surprisingly relevant as resources for thinking through our current crisis-plagued predicament. This book takes stock of the reception history of Lippmann's and Dewey's ideas about publics, communication, and political decision-making and shows how their ideas can inspire a way forward.Lippmann and Dewey were only two of many twentieth-century thinkers trying to imagine how a modern industrial democracy might (or might not) come to pass, but despite that, the "Lippmann/Dewey debate" became a symbol of the two alleged options: an epistocracy, on the one hand, and grassroots participation, on the other. In this book, distinguished scholars from rhetoric, communication, sociology, and media and journalism studies reconsider this debate in order to assess its contemporary relevance for our time, which, in some respects, bears a striking resemblance to the 1920s. In this way, the book explains how and why Lippmann and Dewey are indispensable resources for anyone concerned with the future of democratic deliberation and decision-making.In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Nathan Crick, Robert Danisch, Steve Fuller, William Keith, Bruno Latour, John Durham Peters, Patricia Roberts-Miller, Michael Schudson, Anna Shechtman, Slavko Splichal, Lisa S. Villadsen, and Scott Welsh.

Oil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities.Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states. The chapters engage with African, South American, South Asian, Iranian, and transnational petrofictions and cover topics such as the relationship of colonialism to the fossil fuel economy, issues of gender in the Thermocene epoch, and discussions of migration, precarious labor, and the petro-diaspora. This unique exploration includes testimonies of the oil encounter-through memoirs, journals, and interviews-from a diverse geopolitical grid, ranging from the Permian Basin to the Persian Gulf.By engaging with non-Western literary responses to petroleum in a concentrated, sustained way, this pathbreaking book illuminates the transnational dimensions of the discourse on oil. It will appeal to scholars and students working in literature and science studies, energy humanities, ecocriticism, petrocriticism, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Henry Obi Ajumeze, Rebecca Babcock, Ashley Dawson, Sharae Deckard, Scott DeVries, Kristen Figgins, Amitav Ghosh, Corbin Hiday, Helen Kapstein, Micheal Angelo Rumore, Simon Ryle, Sheena Stief, Imre Szeman, Maya Vinai, and Wendy W. Walters.

Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women's humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest.This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women's suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and '30s gave rise to a new voice of women's humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy.Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains" where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives.An Imperial Homeland reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local landmarks. Focusing on colonial encounters that took place between 1842 and 1915, Adam A. Blackler reveals how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity. As Blackler shows, once the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German metropolitans and white settlers increasingly sought to fortify their presence in Africa using juridical and physical acts of violence, culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century.Grounded in extensive archival research, An Imperial Homeland enriches our understanding of German identity, allowing us to see how a distant colony with diverse ecologies, peoples, and social dynamics grew into an extension of German memory and tradition. It will be of interest to German Studies scholars, particularly those interested in colonial Africa.