Penn Press Log

Sister Carrie, the Pennsylvania Edition Publishing Anniversary

"On this day in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press issued their edition of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, in which some 40,000 words are restored to the text and various changes to the original manuscript are reversed. Far from settling the issue, the Pennsylvania edition provided yet another chapter to one of the most famous and controversial stories in American book publishing."--Today in Literature, April 17, 2013

This Week's New Books

Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics Elizabeth Tandy Shermer 416 pages | 6 x 9 | 18 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4470-0 | $49.95 | £32.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer examines how Barry Goldwater and elite Phoenix businessmen used policy and federal funds to fashion a postwar "business climate," setting off an interstate competition for investment that transformed American politics.

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature Barbara Fuchs 200 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4475-5 | $45.00 | £29.50 A volume in the Haney Foundation Series Amid thorny issues of translation and appropriation, imperial rivalry, the rise of commercial authorship, and anxieties about authenticity, Barbara Fuchs traces how early modern English writers borrowed Spanish literary models, triumphantly reimagining the transnational appropriation as heroic looting.

True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England Frances E. Dolan 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4485-4 | $59.95 | £39.00 Examining seventeenth-century crises of evidence and genres of evidence on which both literary critics and historians now depend, True Relations explores the notion that we apprehend truth through other people's relations of it and that those relations, and our own relation to them, are a function of social relationships in conflict.

Paperclay: Art and Practice Rosette Gault 160 pages | 7 1/2 x 9 3/4 | 150 color illus. Paper 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2241-8 | $28.95 | £19.00 A volume in the New Ceramics series Not for sale outside North America and the Philippines Paperclay is an extremely versatile material for the contemporary potter. Packed with new photographs and clear instructions, Rosette Gault's comprehensive guide is an essential introduction to the medium.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Around the World with Penn Press

You may not need a map to see that scholarly publishers like Penn Press contribute to the world's knowledge and understanding, but it does provide an interesting perspective.

As part of the Univeristy Press Week celebration, Penn Press has created a special Google map to show the reach of our authors and publications. In the Fall 2012 season alone, we touched every continent except Antarctica. (Oh, well. Maybe next season.)

View University of Pennsylvania Press Influence Map in a larger map

For links to other university press maps and details on University Press Week events, visit www.universitypressweek.org.

This Week's New Books: Matching Organs with Donors, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Not in This Family, Sweet Liberty

Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants Marie-Andrée Jacob 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth | ISBN 978-0-8122-4432-8 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0650-0 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series This sensitive ethnography reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how these actors identify and adjudicate suitable matches between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship.

Now in Paperback Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus. Cloth  | ISBN 978-0-8122-4280-5 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper | ISBN 978-0-8122-2216-6 | $26.50 | £17.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0467-4 | $26.50 | £17.50 A volume in the Material Texts series The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

Now in Paperback Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America Heather Murray 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2224-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0740-8 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Not in This Family shows how gays and their heterosexual parents both have animated each other's sensibilities, consciousness, and even culture and politics. Author Heather Murray suggests a reciprocal family life and complicates the notion of gay banishment.

Now in Paperback Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4172-3 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2227-2 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0356-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Early American Studies series Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

This Week's New Books: Death by Effigy, Exquisite Mixture, and Textual Mirrors

Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition Luis R. Corteguera 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4439-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0705-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 A volume in the Early Modern Americas series On July 21, 1578, a small Mexican town awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing a neighbor as a Jew who should burn at the stake. Nine trials over the course of four years revealed a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England Wolfram Schmidgen 280 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4442-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0718-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Haney Foundation Series Exquisite Mixture examines the writing of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain who advocated mixture as a critical element of this belief in English superiority: mixture could produce superior languages, new species, flawless ideas, and resilient civil societies.

Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self Dina Stein 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4436-6 | $79.95 | £52.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0694-4 | $79.95 | £52.00 A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series In Textual Mirrors, Dina Stein draws on literary theory, folklore studies, and semiotics to closely examine midrashic tales in which self-reflexivity operates as a central element. Within these texts, rabbinic discourse itself becomes the object of reflection, both complicating and confirming its religious and ideological principles.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Early African American Print Culture--Now Available

 Early African American Print Culture
Edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein
432 pages | 6 x 9 | 43 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4425-0 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

"Early African American Print Culture reads like a manifesto, a call to action--sometimes directly, by cataloging the work that remains to be done, and sometimes simply by offering models of scholarship on familiar and unfamiliar authors and texts. The central point, of course, is that we need to attend to the whole of American print culture if we are to understand the complexities of African American writing throughout the nineteenth century."--John Ernest, West Virginia University

Early African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Liberty of the Imagination--Now Available

Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States
Edward Cahill
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4412-0 | $65.00 | £42.50

"A masterful account of the transatlantic flow of ideas and the way in which American writers of the Revolutionary and early national periods used those aesthetic arguments to imagine a nation."--Leonard Tennenhouse, Duke University

Liberty of the Imagination reveals the powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Bodies and Books--Now Available

Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Silverman
256 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 | $55.00 | £36.00

"Gillian Silverman's lively study of reading practices in the nineteenth-century United States provides excellent analyses of books and readers alike. How readers could experience 'communion' as both an absorption in each other and a way to absorb books provides a fascinating new understanding of what it means to read. Examining both familiar authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau and newly reinterpreted authors like Mary Austin and Susan B. Warner, Silverman offers a fresh way to understand the forms of intimacy their works provide."--Shirley Samuels, Cornell University

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

The Camera and the Press - Now Available

The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype
Marcy J. Dinius
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 44 illus.
Cloth Apr 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4404-5 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Material Texts series

"An important and original study of interconnections between the daguerreotype and literary writing during the antebellum period. Dinius does a superb job of recovering the history of American responses to the daguerreotype, showing in particular the complex role of writing itself in that reception."--Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland

Through a wide-ranging examination of antebellum images and literature, The Camera and the Press shows how Americans' first encounter with photography was more textual than visual. This thoroughly illustrated case study reexamines current theories on new media and reconnects print and visual culture in nineteenth-century America.

Read more on The Camera and the Press.

Read Marcy Dinius's blog post on Frederick Douglass and the daguerreotype.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Ways of Writing--Now in Paperback

Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England
David D. Hall
248 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4102-0 | $49.95 | £32.50
Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2208-1 | $22.50 | £15.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

"Hall's work . . . complicates and refines our notions of the significance of the individual author and his/her originality in making texts during this period as well as the significance we assign the practices of anonymity. . . . [A] richly detailed and engagingly written study."--American Historical Review

Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in seventeenth-century New England, whether they were fashioned into printed books or disseminated in handwritten form. David D. Hall explores issues of authority and authenticity, the roles of intermediaries, and the political and social contexts of publication, among other issues. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.