Penn Press Log

Books Without Borders--Now Available

Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets
Jeffrey Freedman
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4389-5 | $79.95 | £52.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

This book examines one of the most important axes of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and German-speaking Europe. The first detailed study of the Franco-German trade, it shows how book dealers mediated the transmission of literature across the frontiers of nation, language, and culture. Read more . . .

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

Shame and Honor--Now Available

Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter
Stephanie Trigg
352 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4391-8 | $55.00 | £36.00

Shame and Honor is a cultural history of the Order of the Garter, a medieval institution that persists into the twenty-first century. It explores the changing meaning of medieval culture and ritual practice, and of shame and honor, for early modern, post-medieval, and contemporary culture. 

"It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."--HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. 

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Literacy in the Persianate World--Now Available

Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
Edited by Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway
456 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-1-934536-45-2 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series

Persian has been a written language since the sixth century B.C. Only Chinese, Greek, and Latin have comparable histories of literacy. Although Persian script changed—first from cuneiform to a modified Aramaic, then to Arabic—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries it served a broader geographical area than any language in world history.

Literacy in the Persianate World offers the first comparative study of the historical role of writing in three languages including two in non-Roman scripts, over a period of two and a half millennia, providing an opportunity for reassessment of the work on literacy in English that has accumulated over the past half 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.

John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom--Now Available

John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire
Geoffrey Plank
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4405-2 | $39.95 | £26.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series

Drawing on the diaries of contemporaries, personal correspondence, the minutes of Quaker meetings, business and probate records, pamphlets, and other sources, this book shows that Woolman and his neighbors were far more engaged with the problems of inequality, trade, and warfare than previously understood. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Astounding Wonder--Now Available

Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America
John Cheng
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 Illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4383-3 | $45.00 | £29.50

"John Cheng's highly readable book imaginatively shows the science fiction community's role in, and ways of, perceiving science. Cheng displays the ways in which readers incorporated science fiction into their lives, how this led them to think about science, and further still how some of them imagined aspects of that science into being. Displaying sure-handed use of challenging sources as well as deep knowledge of scientific as well as social theory, Astounding Wonder is cultural history at its best, and so much more."--Ian Gordon, author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture

Read more . . .

 

 

 

 

 

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.

Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Enchantment--Now Available

Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West
C. Stephen Jaeger
440 pages | 6 x 9 | 52 illus.
Cloth Mar 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4329-1 | $69.95 | £45.50
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series

This book examines charisma as the force in art, literature, and film that engages the reader's or viewer's consciousness and inspires admiration and imitation. Thirteen chapters analyze the workings of charisma and its effects, ranging from Homer to Woody Allen. Read more . . .

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

Consuming Pleasures--Now Available

Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World
Daniel Horowitz
528 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4395-6 | $34.95 | £23.00
A volume in the Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America series

"Consuming Pleasures offers a brilliant survey of major transatlantic thinkers. Horowitz is an accomplished historian who has mastered, in stunning depth and breadth, the literature on each of his principal subjects. Lucid, elegant, and engaging."--Howard Brick, author of Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought

Between 1950 and 1972, American and European writers came to envision consumer culture in fresh, provocative ways. Across national boundaries, they shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

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 Satires of Horace--Now in Paperback

The Satires of Horace
Translated by A. M. Juster. Introduction by Susanna Braund
160 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4090-0 | $34.95 | £23.00
Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2209-8 | $18.95 | £12.50

"The best edition available of the 'Satires' in English. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

A. M. Juster's striking new translation relies on the tools and spirit of the English light verse tradition while taking care to render the original text as accurately as possible.

Read more . . .

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

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages--Now Available

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages
Sanping Chen
320 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Mar 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4370-3 | $79.95 | £52.00
A volume in the Encounters with Asia series

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages exposes a number of long-hidden "foreign" elements in Chinese culture that represent the legacy of the Tuoba, a former nomadic group originally from central Asia. Read more . . .

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

This Month's Podcast: A Reading from The Satires of Horace

In the April Penn Press podcast, our own Sara Davis reads selections from The Satires of Horace, translated by A.M. Juster. In the Satires, the Roman philosopher and dramatic critic Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.), known as Horace, provides trenchant social commentary on men's perennial enslavement to money, power, fame, and sex. Juster's striking new translation relies on the tools and spirit of the English light verse tradition while taking care to render the original text as accurately as possible.

Davis reads "Satire 1" and an excerpt from "Satire 10."

Visit the Penn Press podcast page to listen.