Böcker utgivna av Pennsylvania State University Press

Following the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, the seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of print culture in England, including an unprecedented boom in biographical writing. Andrea Walkden offers a case-study examination of this fascinating trend, bringing together texts that generations of scholars have considered piecemeal and primarily as sources for their own research.Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England contributes an incisive, fresh take on life-writing?a catch-all label that, in contemporary discourse, encompasses biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, and even blogs and examines why the writing of life stories appeared somehow newly necessary and newly challenging for political discourse in the late seventeenth century. Walkden engages readers in a compelling discussion of what she terms biographical populism, arguing that the biographies of this period sought to replace political argument with life stories, thus conducting politics by another means. The modern biography, then, emerges after 1649 as a cultural weapon designed to reorient political discourse away from the analysis of public institutions and practices toward a less threatening, but similarly meaningful, conversation about the unfolding of an individual's life in the realm of private experience.Unlike other recent studies, Walkden moves toward a consideration of widely consumed works?the Eikon Basilike, Izaak Walton's Lives, John Aubrey's Brief Lives, and Daniel Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier?and gives particular attention to their complex engagement with that political and literary moment.

A collection of essays introducing and assessing the work of political theorist Wendy Brown. Includes an original essay by Brown and a reply to her critics.

Examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in jeweled crowns, illustrated lapidaries, and illustrated travel accounts in the European Middle Ages.

Examines the life and work of writer and political activist Georg Forster (1754-1794), a participant in Captain Cook's second voyage and one of the leading figures in the Mainz Republic.

Examines visual representations of and by persons defined as Creole, the term applied to white, Black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.

Reconstructs Kenneth Burke's drafting and revision process for A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, placing Burke's work in historical context and revealing his reliance on the concept of myth.

A graphic novel exploring the challenges and fears of parents whose child has been diagnosed with severe heart defects.

A collection of essays exploring medieval rape culture, survivors' speech, and female subjectivity in a late medieval lyric genre known as the pastourelle as well as in related literary works.

Explores changes in American Quakerism in the antebellum period, with particular attention to the beliefs and practices of Quakers in Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley.

Investigates the life histories of Renaissance objects as they experience transformations, and demonstrates these objects' dynamic potential to transform their environments and others as they journey through time and space.

A collection of essays examining the Holiness, Radical Holiness, and Pentecostal movements, focusing on the circulation of ideas among these movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Southeast and East Asia.

Explores the life and work of historian Edward Gibbon, and his complex relationship with Christianity, through an examination of his correspondence, private journals, early works, and unfinished memoirs.

This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society's normative values.Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science.Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.