Bücher veröffentlicht von Pennsylvania State University Press

This text, originally published in Germany in 1990, proposes an extended and original interpretation of Kant, social morality, and philosophy of law. The author articulates his reading of Kant in the context of an account of modernity as a "polyphonous project".

Examines the paradoxes inherent in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to posterity.

Examines the concept of the enthymeme in ancient Greek rhetoric, arguing that it is a technique of storytelling aimed at eliciting from the audience an inference about a narrative.

Examines the concept of metanoia as both a rhetorical figure of speech and a critical tool for the analysis of self-reinventions of all kinds, including conversions related to race, sex, religion, and politics.

Examines how English Catholic exiles in Spain used print and other written media to promote the conquest of England and the spiritual renewal of Christendom.

Brings together scholars from several disciplines in Reformation studies to examine the life, work, and enduring significance of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571.

Advocates a conversation around the genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancers that focuses less on choice and more on care. Offers a new set of conceptual starting points for understanding what is at stake with a BRCA diagnosis and what the focus on choice obstructs from view.

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.The prologue reads Marlowe''s Dr. Faustus to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus''s famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss''s classic essay, "The Gift," into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy with the market economy, his description of the gift economy nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern.Literature and philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings of The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, which constitute the body of the text. These readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social norms. Antonio in Merchant and the title character in Edward II practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his daughter''s cultural value. Finally, Prospero in The Tempest sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess and its secrecy.While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts-and how we are to live with others in the world.

A collection of essays on Akkadian linguistics honoring the career of scholar John Huehnergard and covering topics including lexicon, morphology, word order, syntax, verbal semantics, and subgrouping.

A reappraisal of the early cultural history of the Bactrian camel and the dromedary based on archaeology, iconography, inscriptions, and other text sources. Critically evaluates the various camel references in the Hebrew Bible and in the Gospels.

A collection of essays addressing the nexus of religion and geography in the ancient Near East, presenting several case studies that cover a range of time periods and areas to illuminate the diverse phenomena that occur when religion is viewed through the lenses of space and place.

A multidisciplinary collection of essays exploring current scholarship on the history of human identification. Examines how techniques of identification are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation.

A collection of essays analyzing ecohorror motifs in literature, manga, film, and television, illuminating ambiguities that arise from human encounters with nonhuman nature and examining the scale and effect of ecohorror in, and of, the Anthropocene.

How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that cultural practices developed in an adversarial relationship with natural processes. Moreover, these essays elucidate the links between humans and the lands they inhabit, both then and now.

A collection of essays delineating the centuries-long dialogue of Jews and Jewish culture with China, all under the overarching theme of cultural translation.

Eating and drinking?vital to all human beings?were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare's plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and influential by scholars can now be considered in terms of another revealing cultural marker?that of culinary dynamics.Renaissance scholars, as David Goldstein and Amy Tigner point out, have only begun to grapple with the importance of cuisine in literature. An earlier generation of criticism concerned itself principally with cataloguing the foodstuffs in the plays. Recent analyses have operated largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority, working to historicize food in relation to the early modern body. The essays in Culinary Shakespeare build upon that prior focus on individual bodily experience but also transcend it, emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food, while also presenting valuable theoretical background. As various essays demonstrate, many of the central issues in Shakespeare studies can be elucidated by turning our attention to the study of food and drink. The societal and religious associations of drink, for example, or the economic implications of ingredients gathered from other lands, have meaningful implications for our understanding of both early modern and contemporary periods?including aspects of community, politics, local and global food production, biopower and the state, addiction, performativity, posthumanism, and the relationship between art and food. Culinary Shakespeare seeks to open new interpretive possibilities and will be of interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare and the early modern period as well as to those in food studies, food history, ecology, gender and domesticity, and critical theory.

Explores literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, focusing on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states.

Examines the history of the Anglican Church in Burma (Myanmar) and explores its complexities, and its future, in the context of world Christianity.

A collection of essays addressing the relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects of the technical vocabulary of rhetorical theory.

A collection of essays examining the conceptual and methodological issues that currently inform the study of text and ritual in the Pentateuch.

A collection of essays on civil religion in modern political philosophy, exploring the engagement between modern thought and the Christian tradition.

Surveys the many different impacts of Ciceronian theories on a diverse array of texts and authors between 1100 and 1550, presenting a counternarrative to the widely accepted belief in the dominance of Aristotelianism in early European political and social thought.

Examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity, making only sporadic efforts to propagate Spanish during the sixteenth century. Challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.

Explores several classic works of social and political thought, examining how the history of their publication materially affected their meaning and reception over time. Case studies include works by Durkheim, Mead, Marx, Du Bois, and Weber.

Examines the work of satirists through the lenses of humor studies, cultural theory, and rhetorical and social philosophy, arriving at a new definition of the comic art form.