Penn Press Log

This Week's New Books: The Jet Sex, Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture, Stuyvesant Bound, and Owning William Shakespeare

Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture Edited by Gary Hatfield and Holly Pittman 496 pages | 6 x 9 | 27 illus. Cloth 2013 | ISBN 978-1-934536-49-0 | $69.95 | £45.50 A volume in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology series Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture draws together studies in archaeology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, genetics, neuroscience, and environmental science to investigate the evolution of the human mind, the brain, and the human capacity for culture. Read more...

Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time Donna Merwick 232 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. Cloth Apr 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4503-5 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Early American Studies series Stuyvesant Bound is an innovative, compelling reassessment of the last Director-General of New Netherland. Donna Merwick employs a multidisciplinary approach to examine the layers of culture within which Peter Stuyvesant forged his career and performed his identity. Read more...

The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon Victoria Vantoch 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus. Cloth Apr 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4481-6 | $34.95 | £23.00 Victoria Vantoch takes us on a fascinating journey into the golden era of air travel. The Jet Sex explores the much-mythologized stewardess within the context of the Cold War, globalization, and the emerging culture of glamour to reveal how beauty and sexuality were critical to national identity and international politics. Read more...

Now in Paperback Owning William Shakespeare: The King's Men and Their Intellectual Property James J. Marino 216 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Cloth 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4296-6 | $49.95 | £32.50 Paper 2013 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2254-8 | $22.50 | £15.00 A volume in the Material Texts series This book explores actors' systems of intellectual property in early modern England. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other plays, James Marino demonstrates how Shakespeare's company asserted ownership of its plays through intense ongoing revision and through insistent attribution to Shakespeare. 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 Week's New Books: Public Capitalism and Changing is Not Vanishing

Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives Christopher McMahon 208 pages | 6 x 9 Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4444-1 | $39.95 | £26.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0726-2| $39.95 | £26.00 A volume in the Haney Foundation Series Political philosopher Christopher McMahon argues that the social authority of corporate executives is best understood as a form of political authority. Public Capitalism explores the implications of that claim and sketches a new theoretical framework for discussion of the moral and political issues faced by corporate executives. Read more . . .

Now in Paperback Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 Edited by Robert Dale Parker 456 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 10 illus. Paper | ISBN 978-0-8122-2218-0 | $26.50 | £17.50 Changing Is Not Vanishing simultaneously reinvents the history of American Indian literature and American poetry by uncovering a vast but forgotten archive of early American Indian poems. The book includes work by 82 writers and a full bibliography of poems by more than 140 Indian writers who wrote before 1930. 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.

Paul's Pick for March, a Free Article from The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation

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 the Ides of March is "Sympathy for the Sovereign: Sovereignty, Sympathy, and the Colonial Relation in Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," by Peter DeGabriele of Mississippi State University. The article appears in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Vol. 53.1 Spring 2012.

DeGabriele writes:

Sympathy, then, is questioned not only in its inapplicability to geological masses, but also in its reach, in its ability to stretch its combinatory powers over large distances. It is precisely this capacity of sympathy that gets called into question within the realm of human affairs throughout The Decline and Fall. In particular, Gibbon questions the ability of sympathy to bridge the vast social gap between sovereign and subject, and also between Imperial center and colonial periphery. In doing so, he questions what had become a dominant theme in eighteenth-century political philosophy at his time of writing: the replacement of the vertical bond with the sovereign as the agent of social cohesion, by the horizontal force of sympathy.

To download this free article and learn more about The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, click here.

Check the Penn Press Log on April 15 for Paul's next pick.

Truth and Democracy--Now Available

Truth and Democracy
Edited by Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris
352 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4379-6 | $69.95 | £45.50
A volume in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism series

"Truth and Democracy explores an important set of questions: Can truth be set aside or rejected in politics? If truth is to be considered, in what way should it matter and what significance would this have for democracy? The book contains strong work by a number of prominent scholars, and the alternation between extended reflection and critical reflection makes for a stimulating dynamic of engagement."--Keith J. Bybee, Syracuse 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.

Paul's Pick for February, a Free Article from the Journal of the History of Ideas

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 February, Freedom, the Common Good, and the Rule of Law: Lippmann and Hayek on Economic Planning by Ben Jackson, appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

In the article, Jackson writes:

Walter Lippmann’s case against economic planning, formed in response to certain aspects of the New Deal, provided a striking first approximation of key arguments that [Friedrich] Hayek would later articulate in his own work: the objection to economic planning on the grounds that it would destroy not just valued economic liberties but also civil and political freedoms; an emphasis on the importance of a certain form of legal order for the preservation of liberty; and the need for critics of planning to offer a positive liberal reform agenda that was compatible with this understanding of the law.

To download this free article and learn more about the Journal of the History of Ideas, click here.

Check the Penn Press Log on March 15 for Paul's next pick.