Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Intentionality and the New Traditionalism argues that both the text and the author of a literary work are important to a cogent and full reading of that work. The author creates the text, which then leads the reader into a reading of it through its various elements or literary devices that have been consciously employed by the author. The author''s presence is thus continuous in the work and important to it. Such elements and literary devices create what can be called an "intentionality" of the text and become limina, or thresholds, through which the reader can enter the world of the text. The limina direct the reader toward one means of understanding the work. Shawcross discusses and demonstrates the significance of specific types of limina, including genre, structure, and numerological relationships within the work, the use of Latin, allusion and historical/biographical context, onomastics, the performing self, and intertextuality. Some of these, such as genre, have been dismissed in recent critical stances, and others have been little considered.Shawcross first explores genre, looking at poetic genres and subgenres, the difference between genre and mode, the generic question of tragedy/comedy, the concept of lyric, and the significance of sequence. He then illustrates the importance of other limina to a variety of authors and periods. He also offers new readings of particular works and suggests possible revised readings of other works of similar nature. Shawcross draws primarily on poetry and works of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, but drama and the novel as well as the nineteenth century are also included.

An examination of the artistic implications that oral tradition holds for the understanding of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", in order to establish a context for their original performance and modern-day reception. It disentangles the interwoven strands of orality, textuality and art.

This work synthesizes a broad range of historical and contemporary literature dealing with conscience. It traces the development of the notion of conscience in the western philosophical tradition and rehabilitates conscience as a useful, even crucial, concept for ethical theory.

The relationship between the living and the dead was significant in defining community identity and spiritual belief in the early Medieval world. This text reveals the social significance of burial rites in early Medieval Europe during the time of the Merovingian kings from 500 to 800 C.E.

An examination of how the German Lutheran and Reformed populations of eastern Pennsylvania integrated themselves successfully into the early American republic. Their story illuminates the path that other immigrants and ethnic Americans would travel in the decades to follow.

Inspired by Martin Heidegger, John Lysaker develops a concept of ur-poetry to explore philosophically how poetic language creates fresh meaning in our world and transforms the way in which we choose to live in it. To demonstrate ur-poetry in action, the book focuses on the work of Charles Simic.

The Shepheardes Calender is the poem that launched Edmund Spenser''s career and changed the direction of English poetry. In this reappraisal, Lynn Staley Johnson demonstrates that Spenser himself made a self-conscious effort to create a new literature, a new esthetic for a new era. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, she places the poem in its literary, social, political , and cultural context, contributing to our understanding of the relationship between Speser and his times. She pays particular attention to the emergence of the myth of Elizabeth and of England during the first half of Elizabeth''s reign and the ways in which the young Spenser manipulated the concerns and issues of the time, transforming popular culture into literary expression.By its active engagement with both the present and the past, the Calender suggests Spenser''s conception of poetry as informed dialogue designed for social work, offering a reinterpretation of the relationship between the poet and his community. Choosing not to be circumscribed by the voices of his significant historical and literary past, the Calender proclaims the poet, not as transmitter or mediator, but as an active and shaping force, capable of remaking the present by offering his age a picture of a new and potentially more glorious reality.Johnson seeks to bridge the gap between the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by linking Spenser''s strategies and themes to those of his medieval forebears, especially Chaucer. Both Edmund Spenser and his enigmatic Calender stand facing two ways, back into the age dubbed "middle" and forward, hailing the new; as it''s study demonstrates, only by bringing these views into a single focus can we begin to appreciate the radical and innovative nature of a poem that for many heralds the renaissance of English poetry.

Using the growth of the US arsenal at Frankford, Pennsylvania - from a small post to a full-scale industrial complex - as a background, this text examines the changing technology of early 19th-century warfare, the impact it had on the army and the social ramifications of industrialization.

A comprehensive study of the influence Spenser had on the forms, images, and style of the principal Romantic poets and how Spenserianism pervades not just their writings but also the subconscious thinking and spirit of the Romantic era.Edmund Spenser''s tremendous popularity among the Romantics has always been recognized, but his role in their poetics has never been extensively explored because of a widely shared scholarly assumption about the intellectual superficiality of their response to him. Many of the Romantics honored Spenser as their favorite poet, the muse that inspired their own creative ambitions, but their love of him has often been discounted as a fatuous worship of the beauty of his work in total disregard of his thought. Kucich shows how this stereotype has been based on several notorious statements about Spenser that do not fully reflect the range and complexity of the Romantics'' response to him. To measure this response accurately, Kucich has uncovered a wealth of commentary on Spenser in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He reveals how Spenserianism became a cultural tradition in the eighteenth century that eventually developed into and helped sustain a habit of mind that is central to Romantic poetics---the open-ended interior debate that many leading Romantic scholars are now discussing as the principal conditioning force in Romantic poetics.

Cervantes''s great novel Don Quixote is a diptych, the first part of which was published in 1605 and the second in 1615. Focusing almost entirely on the novel''s second part, Henry W. Sullivan is the first critic to offer a systematic account of Don Quixote''s passage from madness to sanity. Sullivan argues that Part II of the novel is a salvation epic, within which the Cave of Montesinos episode is the single most important pivot in the Knight''s confrontation with his own emotional difficulties.In this carefully researched and challenging study, Sullivan shows that chapters 22-24 (the Cave of Montesinos episode) represent an entrance into Purgatory, while chapter 55 is the exit from this realm. The Knight and his Squire are made to suffer excruciating torments in the chapters in between, experiencing a Purgatory in this life. This original reading of the book is coupled with an explanation that this Purgatory is "grotesque" since Don Quixote''s and Sancho''s sins are venial and can thus be cleansed by theological means against a background of comedy. By combining these two aspects, Sullivan exposes both the deeply agonizing and the comic aspects of the text. In addition, the combination of theological interpretation and Lacanian analysis to show Don Quixote''s salvation/cure in this life results in a truly comprehensive vision of the Knight''s progress. Sullivan also summarizes, in five different streams of critical tradition, the accumulated reception history of the Cave of Montesinos incident, drawing on scholarly writings from the nineteenth century to the present.

For three years during World War II, future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles commanded the OSS mission in Bern, Switzerland. From Hitler''s Doorstep provides an annotated selection of his reports to Washington from 1942 to 1945. Dulles was a leading source of Allied intelligence on Nazi Germany and the occupied nations. The messages presented in this volume were based on information received through agents and networks operating in France, Italy, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Germany itself. They deal with subjects ranging from enemy troop strength and military plans to political developments, support of resistance movements, secret weapons, psychological warfare, and peace feelers. The Dulles reports reveal his own vision of grand strategy and presage the postwar turmoil in Europe.One of the largest collections of OSS records ever published, these telegrams and radiotelephone transmissions from the National Archives provide an exciting account of the course of the European war, offer insight on the development of American intelligence, and illuminate the origins of the Cold War. They will interest diplomatic and military historians as well as specialists on modern Europe. This volume is almost unique as document-based intelligence history and serves as a badly needed bridge between diplomatic history and intelligence studies.

An examination of the themes of love, medicine and dreams in the late mediaeval Spanish masterpiece, "Celestina". It explores the European cultural and literary tradition to discover theoretical approaches to the physiology of lovesickness and its dreams and visions.

By "the fear of freedom" Greer means the unconscious flight from the heavy burden of individual choice an open society lays upon its members. The miraculous represents a heavenly power brought down to earth and tied to the life of the community. Understanding how miracles were perceived in the late antiquity requires us to put aside the notion of a miracle as the violation of the natural order. "Miracles" for the church fathers refers to anything that evokes wonder. Rowan Greer is not concerned with conclusions about the truth or falsity of the miracles reported in the ancient sources. He is concerned with how the miracle stories shaped the way people understood Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries.Once the Church gained the predominance in the Empire as part of the Constantinian revolution, most Christians thought that a new Christian commonwealth was int he making. The miracles associated with the cult of the saints (the martyrs and their relics) in the Christian Empire were part of this sacralization. In the Roman imperial church we find a tension between the Christian message, which revolved around virtue and the individual, and corporate piety that focused upon the empowering of the people of God.With Augustine we find Christian Platonism transformed into a "new theology" far more congruent with the corporate poetry that had by then developed. An emphasis upon grace and upon God''s sovereignty fits a preoccupation with miracles better than the old emphasis upon human freedom and virtue and sets the stages for the Western Middle Ages and the cult of the saints, organized and made central to Christian piety.From a study of Roman imperial Christianity before the collapse of the West we discover the tendency to substitute one kind of freedom for another. Freedom as the capacity of human beings to choose the good does not, of course, disappear, but on the whole it is made subordinate to notions of God''s sovereign grace and even to an insistence upon the authority of the church.

An account of the working of the 18th-century German book trade as revealed by the career of Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811). It draws upon Nicolai's correspondence and provides insights into how books came into existence, what tactics prospective authors used, and other matters.

Traces the course of Hegel's critical engagement with traditional Christian ideas and practices from his years as a dutiful schoolboy in Stuttgart through his blossoming as a philosopher in Jena.

A volume of 19 essays by literary critic Philip Young, in which he reveals the "so what?" that he insisted all literary studies ought to have. In three sections, the essays demonstrate his fascination with American myths, examine the writing of Hemingway, and explore other topics in literature.