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.
Explores the sociogenesis and development of the French royal mistress, examining the careers of nine of the most significant holders of that title between 1444 and the final years of the ancien regime.
John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art
Explores the art of John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture. Argues that the artist was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.
Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture
Investigates contemporary and historical rhetorics of rape culture within institutional, legal, cultural, and medical discourses. Examines how discourses about rape rely on strategies of containment and deny the felt experiences of victims, ultimately stalling broader claims for justice in the United States.
Examines two anonymous manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Explores how scribes assembled these texts within wider cultural developments surrounding early modern forms of magic.
Mary Shelley lived and wrote during an age of religious instability, one that witnessed the spread of atheism, millenarianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Evangelicalism, among other belief systems. In this book, Jennifer L. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement ......
This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers' perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the ......
Traces the history of three massive palaces built outside Naples in the eighteenth century-at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta-and examines how these buildings were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
