Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

"'Who is 'African' in a global ecumene? Anthropologist Copeland Carson poses this challenging question in her study of cultural dynamics in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. . . . Highly recommended."-Choice

Presents devotional "occasions" or experiences by Irish Catholics. This is an anthropological study of Irish Catholicism. It includes ethnographical material, archival sources, cultural observations, accounts of individual experiences, and scrutiny of religious questions and theories which illuminates twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork.

Were the Romantic poets plagiarists, and did plagiarism have the same meaning two hundred years ago as it has today? Tilar J. Mazzeo offers a major reassessment of the role of borrowing, textual appropriation, and narrative mastery in British Romantic literature and provides a new picture of the period and its central aesthetic contests.

Through a wide-ranging study of literature, art, and philosophy, Daniel Cottom explains why ours is an unhuman culture and how this culture still gives us reason for hope.

Presents a study of midrash - the biblical exegesis, parables, and anecdotes of the Rabbis. This work examines early, tannaitic legal midrash, focusing on the interpretive tradition associated with the figure of Rabbi Ishmael. It also locates the Rabbi Ishmael hermeneutic within the religious landscape of Second Temple and post-Temple literature.

Barbarian Tides radically subverts the grand narrative of a "Germanic" migration and reinvents the role of barbarians in the Later Roman Empire. Goffart sets out how the fragmented foreign peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity.

"A remarkable achievement. Bartal presents the broad contours of nineteenth-century East European Jewish history even as he reworks them into a nontraditional narrative."-David Engel, New York University