Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

A collection of essays exploring the ways in which art and literature have imagined, animated, and embodied the complex ecology of Philadelphia since the seventeenth century. Essays utilize emerging methods of interpretation in ecocriticism, new materialism, art history, philosophy, and urban studies.

A critical translation of an account of a failed colonial project by opponents of the French Revolution, led by the aristocrat Claude-Francois-Adrien de Lezay-Marnesia, in present-day Ohio.

Analyzes the reception of nineteenth-century French women poets, including Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, Elisa Mercoeur, Melanie Waldor, Louise Colet, Anais Segalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louise Ackermann, and Marie Krysinska, to recover the diversity of women's voices.

At 9:53 on the morning of July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a Renault Trafic van loaded with explosives into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, a Jewish community center in the bustling commercial neighborhood of Once, Buenos Aires. The explosion left eighty-five people dead and over three hundred wounded. Originally published amid widespread controversy, Once@9:53am: Terror en Buenos Aires imagines the two hours before the attack through the popular format of the fotonovela. Part documentary, part fiction, this vivid retelling of Argentina's deadliest bombing depicts a vibrant, complex urban community in the hours before its identity was forever changed. This expanded English edition includes a new essay by Ilan Stavans detailing the aftermath of the attack and the faulty investigations that have yet to yield any arrests or reach resolution. A unique and powerful visual experience, Once@9:53am is both a commemoration of an atrocity that shifted Latin American Jewish identity in innumerable ways and an ingenious use of a popular format to explore the dangerous intersection of politics and religion in Latin America.

A biography of Ernest Hemingway that places his life and art in the defining contexts of the women and places that were important to him, and the pattern of mental illness and suicide in his family.

An interdisciplinary study examining the origins of Anglo-Norman views of kingship in idealized interpretations of Charlemagne's imperium. Demonstrates how the idea of "Englishness" developed in the Middle Ages as much as a consequence of the Anglo-Norman imagination and experience as a reaction against it.

A critical translation of Rene Brimo's 1938 French study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patronage and art collecting in the United States.

Explores how definitions of Spanish modernisms from 1874 to 1923 were dependent upon the concepts of degeneration and regeneration. Analyzes the relation between these concepts by examining representations of the body in specific spaces.

Analyzes how the premodern city, through the example of Renaissance Florence, can be understood as an acoustic phenomenon. Explores how city sounds, such as the ringing of church bells, can be foundational elements in the creation and maintenance of urban communities and the spaces they inhabit.

Explores how modern means of communication are changing religion, and how contemporary mediations of religion challenge and refine the aspirations and prospects of religious authority.

Originally published in French in 2002, examines the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg. Demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas, addressing broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, symbols, and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.

Focusing on travel images and cross-cultural exchange, examines interactions between the Ottoman Empire and Europeans from 1774 to 1839, highlighting mutual dependence and reciprocity.

Investigates why nineteenth-century British painters and photographers as diverse as the Pre-Raphaelites, P. H. Emerson, and Augustus John pursued truth to nature, and how contemporary science and philosophy informed their artistic practice and the critical reception of their work.

Examines the small-scale works of the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, and the aesthetic and cognitive operation of smallness in art of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

A collection of essays using historical and philological approaches to study the transit of texts in the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period. Examines the nature of texts themselves and how they travel, and reveals the details behind the transit of texts across cultures, languages, and epochs.

Explores the proliferation of spiritualist seances in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, and the connection to the contemporary evolution of the media entertainment industry.

Focusing on the astronomer Johannes Kepler's 1604 treatise on optics, explores Kepler's radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how he posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge in the early modern period.

Explores the historical imagination of the late sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel, focusing on the complex interplay of classical antiquity, local history, and art history.

Examines the text and background of The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching, an autobiography by the fourteenth-century Benedictine monk John of Morigny. Explores how the author negotiated the categories of magic and heresy in relation to Christianity.

Explores majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic from the late 1700s in Spain. Examines conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity.

Originally published in Spanish. A graphic novel, part documentary, part fiction, using the fotonovela form to imagine the two hours before the terrorist attack against the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994. Explores the faulty police investigation of the atrocity, and minorities' vulnerability in democratic societies.

A collection of four stories of the supernatural by early twentieth-century medievalist and antiquarian M. R. James, exemplifying how James redefined the ghost story and how his connection to academia, antiquities, and medievalism inspired and informed his fiction.

Explores how the novels of Henry James reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society, and how essential the language and imagery of the arts, as well as friendships with artists, were to James's writing.

A collection of essays investigating the early modern debates on the nature of sight and its epistemic value.

Shows how our understanding of narratives of illness can by transformed byrecognizing the zombie metaphors within them and how the recent medicalization ofpopular zombie narratives has added new dimensions to what is symbolized by thisfigure.

A collection of twelve illustrated essays modeling innovative approaches to reading Chaucer's visual poetics. Essays explore connections between Chaucer's texts and various forms of visual data, medieval and modern, that can deepen and inform our understanding of Chaucer's poetry.

Explores the actions of the radical Roman Catholic antinuclear activist group Plowshares. Focuses on the closely interwoven religious and social significance of the group's actions and subsequent legal trials, which rely on performances of moral distinction to achieve the activists' aims.

Examines the eighteenth-century crisis in the Moravian Church known as the Sifting Time, and the church's subsequent shift from radical beliefs and practices to conservative mainstream Protestantism.