Penn Press Log

Paul's Pick: How the Golem Came to Prague, a Free Article from Jewish Quarterly Review

Paul's pick for May is "How the Golem Came to Prague"  by Edan Dekel and David Gantt Gurley. The article appears in Spring 2013 issue of Jewish Quarterly Review.

This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron Goldschmidt.  These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend.

Click here to download this free article and learn more about Jewish Quarterly Review.

Check the Penn Press Log in June for Paul's next pick.

Paul's Pick: "Why We Argue About the Way We Read," a free article from The Eighteenth Century

Paul's pick for March is "Why We Argue About the Way We Read"  by Lisa A. Freeman at the University of Illinois Chicago. The article appears in Spring 2013 issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

The article is an introduction to a new feature called “Critical Conversations.” Our intention is to provide our community of readers with short pieces by eighteenth-century scholars that address the timely and topical intellectual debates circulating within the academic profession at large. We are honored that the inaugural Critical Conversation, “Why We Argue About the Way We Read,” is guest edited by Lisa A. Freeman, with contributions from Emily Hodgson Anderson, Suvir Kaul, Stuart Sherman, and Kristina Straub.

Click here to download this free article and learn more about The Eighteenth Century.

Check the Penn Press Log in April for Paul's next pick.

Paul's Pick: a Free Article on Working Women from the Journal of the Early Republic

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's Pick for August is "Women on the Edge: Life at Street Level in the Early Republic" by Gloria L. Main, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"Historians are taking a fresh look at life and work in early American cities," writes Main. "They have long appreciated the vital economic and cultural roles played by cities through the ages. It is only recently, however, that they have discovered that we cannot understand how those cities actually functioned without taking into account the economic contributions of ordinary women and children, bound and free."

Main's article will appear in the upcoming Fall issue of the Journal of the Early Republic. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Women performed critical functions in the economies of early American cities, but female members of all classes found themselves disadvantaged by both the law and the market, where coverture, marginal jobs, and low wages forced their dependency on men. Yet, even when fully employed, men of the “working poor” did not earn enough to support their families.  As a result, most poor families relied on the earnings of mothers and children to get by.

Click here to download this free article and learn more about the Journal of the Early Republic.

Check the Penn Press Log in September for Paul's next pick.