Penn State Press: Literature Publishing Program

“Penn State University Press’s impressive publication list provides a splendid mirror of the past half-century’s scholarship and criticism in language and literature. Beginning with several highly regarded studies in French, German, and American literature, it quickly responded to the times, initiating series and journals to reflect the growing importance of Spanish, the emergence of African American literature, and the rediscovery of women writers. By cultivating comparative literature and various interdisciplinary approaches, it has responded imaginatively to ever-new vogues in theory and methodology while wisely avoiding the extremes of traditionalism or trendiness.”

—Theodore Ziolkowski, Princeton University

Along with art history and philosophy, the study of language and literature was well represented on the Press’s list from the very beginning. Of the first thirty titles issued, a third came from this sector of the humanistic disciplines, with the earliest being Laurent LeSage’s Jean Giraudoux: His Life and Works (1959). Besides French literature, the Press concentrated for its first three decades mostly on the literatures of England, Germany, and the United States, with some attention to Italian and Russian literature as well. By the mid-1990s, however, Spanish literature became the primary focus, largely owing to the energy of Frederick de Armas, a co-editor of the Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures series, and to the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s generosity in providing subsidies for books devoted to its national literary heritage.

Press books largely examined the genres of fiction and poetry, while drama tended to receive less attention—with the major exception of the works of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was the subject not only of numerous individual titles but also of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, edited for many years by Stanley Weintraub (himself a prolific writer of books about Shaw and other topics). Other authors featured in several Press books include Chaucer, Dickinson, Eliot, Emerson, Hemingway, Joyce, Milton, Pound, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Like Shaw, Chaucer holds a place of special importance at the Press: the Press journal The Chaucer Review was founded in 1966 and edited for more than thirty years by Robert Frank. The distinguished literary scholar Philip Young contributed a number of books on Hemingway, and his The Private Melville was published posthumously in 1993. (Young’s former students David Morrell and Sandra Spanier edited a collection of his essays titled American Fiction, American Myth in 2000.) Another subfield in which the Press has made some notable contributions is African American literature, especially with the anthology edited by Richard A. Long and Eugenia W. Collier, Afro-American Writing (1985), which was the main collection on the market until the Norton Anthology of African American Literature arrived in 1997 to provide stiff competition.

Complementing the many Penn State Press books focused on a single author or national literary culture was the list the Press developed in explicitly comparative literature. This was stimulated by the Press’s publication of the Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, edited by Joseph Strelka, which produced ten volumes from 1968 to 1983. The Press later took over publication of one of the leading journals in the field, Comparative Literature Studies, from the University of Illinois Press in 1987. Monographs by preeminent scholars offered a magisterial sweep across the writings of multiple authors and the literatures of multiple countries. The Press published Thomas Beebee’s “Clarissa” on the Continent (1990) and The Ideology of Genre (1994), for example; Martin Green’s The Robinson Crusoe Story (1990), Seven Types of Adventure Tale (1991), and The Adventurous Male (1993); several books by Bettina L. Knapp, including Women in Twentieth-Century Literature (1987) and Exile and the Writer (1991); and four books by Giancarlo Maiorino, from The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts (1990) up to his prize-winning At the Margins of the Renaissance (2003).

The Press has tried to build bridges between literary criticism and other disciplines in which it publishes. Some books signaled this aim in their very titles, such as Frederick Garber’s Repositionings: Readings of Contemporary Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art (1995) and L. H. LaRue’s Constitutional Law as Fiction: Narrative in the Rhetoric of Authority (1995). Others did so more subtly, like Peter A. Dorsey’s Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography (1993), Roy Eriksen’s The Building in the Text: From Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (2000), Luba Freedman’s Titian’s Portraits Through Aretino’s Lens (1995), and Anne Winston-Allen’s Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (1997). Two of the Press’s series—History of the Book, edited by James L. W. West III, and Literature and Philosophy, edited by Anthony J. Cascardi—aim to foster interdisciplinary scholarship.

Besides literary criticism as such, the Press also achieved visibility in language, linguistics, and rhetoric. Burton Raffel, called by one reviewer “arguably the greatest living translator of verbal art into English,” produced companion volumes on The Art of Translating Poetry (1988) and The Art of Translating Prose (1994) that have proved of enduring value. Among translations of literary masterpieces the Press has issued, two in particular have stood the test of time very successfully: Gerard J. Brault’s translation of La Chanson de Roland (1984) and Judith H. McDowell’s translation of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1986). Both have gone through many printings. From 1967 until 1991 the Press published the journal General Linguistics and, complementing it, a modest but steady stream of related books. In rhetoric, the Press came to the fore early on, launching the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in 1968. (P&R has long been regarded as one of the best in its field.) In recent years, Penn State Press books have concentrated in what is now called informal logic, but the range of the list extends from classics like Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1994), as edited by Peter Medine, to Gary Remer’s Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (1996) and Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (2004), edited by Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer.

Over time, the field of language and literature came to dominate the Press’s list. Indeed, in the period 1985–1989, it accounted for nearly half of the Press’s output. But as the scope of the publishing program broadened, especially into the social sciences, fewer works on language and literature appeared; in 1995, when director Sanford Thatcher identified traditional literary criticism as particularly vulnerable to changes in the market for scholarly monographs, he regretfully announced the Press’s decision to withdraw from the field, except for the series to which it was already committed.

The Press still publishes the History of the Book and the Literature and Philosophy series, and two new Penn State Press series will welcome scholarly contributions in language and literature: The Penn State Library of Jewish Literature, edited by Baruch Halpern and Aminadav Dykman, and Refiguring Modernism: Arts, Literatures, Sciences, edited by a multidisciplinary advisory board now chaired by Penn State English professor Mark Morrisson. Several books by art historians—David Peters Corbett, Barbara Larson, and Jordana Mendelson, among others—inaugurated the Refiguring Modernism series, but the series will embrace interdisciplinary works by authors in literature departments as well.

One of the Press’s noteworthy new initiatives is its revival of the Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures series—now renamed the Penn State Series in Romance Studies—as a major project of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, formed in 2005 as a joint effort of the Press and the Penn State Libraries. An advisory board has been appointed from the Departments of French and of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese to oversee the series editorially, and two books by senior scholars have already been approved for publication, with several more under consideration. This unique series will take advantage of modern technology to provide fully searchable “open access” to the books online at the Libraries’ web site; at the same time, it will offer browsers the option of purchasing the books “on demand,” in regular print format, through one of the Press’s printing partners. The series will thus afford serious students and scholars the opportunity to have the books in print at a reasonable price, and the web technology will make available supplementary materials—such as color illustrations, documentary appendixes, and texts in their original languages—that enhance the rich experience of engaging with these books but are too expensive to provide in print editions. Indeed, in a happy irony, the advance of digital technology is now giving new and even perpetual life to books once thought to be headed for extinction.

Choice Outstanding Academic Books

C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (2004)

Reed Way Dasenbrock, Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics (2001)

Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (2000)

James Engell, The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999)

John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (1999)

James Perrin Warren, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (1999)

Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confront the Holocaust—Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (1997)

Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996)

Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (1996)

Michael Ugarte, Madrid, 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (1996)

Robert Thomas Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery (1995)

Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (1994)

William J. Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times (1993)

Peter J. Burgard, Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay (1993)

Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (1993)

Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges, eds., Johann Gottfried Herder: Selected Early Works, 1764–1767 (1993)

Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993)

Kent Cartwright, Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (1991)

Oscar Mandel, August von Kotzebue: The Comedy, the Man (1990)

Robert M. Browning, German Poetry in the Age of Enlightenment: From Brockes to Klopstock (1979)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook, 1835–1841, with a Preface by Barbara S. Mouffe, Introduction by Hyatt H. Waggoner, and Foreword by Charles Ryskamp (1979)

Bernard Oldsey, Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing of “A Farewell to Arms” (1979)

Gerard J. Brault, The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition, 2 vols. (1978)

Joseph P. Strelka, ed., Yearbook in Comparative Criticism, Vol. 1: Perspectives in Literary Symbolism (1972)

Book Prizes

Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (2004 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association)

Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2001 Prize in Biography, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers)

Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose, eds., Book History (2000 Best New Journal Award, Council of Editors of Learned Journals)

Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (1999 Ungar Prize, American Translators Association)

Arabella Lyon, Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored (1999 W. Ross Winterowd Book Award, Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition)

Dubravka Ugrei, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (1999 Heldt Prize, Association for Women in Slavic Studies)

Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1997 Book Prize, American Conference on Romanticism)

John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (1997 Honor Book, Children’s Literature Association)

Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921 (1995 Donald Murphy Prize, American Conference for Irish Studies)

Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government (1993 James Holly Hanford Award, Milton Society of America)

Juan Ruiz, Book of True Love, trans. Saralyn R. Daly (1980 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American Poets)

“For the past half-century, despite the ups and downs most university presses have experienced, Penn State University Press has continued to be at the forefront of literary publishing. From French theory and American poetics to medieval Spanish literature and the biography of T. S. Eliot, Penn State continues to bring us high-quality books on genuinely new subjects. The Press has managed to avoid passing trends even as it is at the cutting edge of literary scholarship: its new Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing is an example.”

—Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University

Best Sellers

Richard A. Long and Eugenia W. Collier, eds., Afro-American Writing (1985): 20,000+

Thomas F. Magner, Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language (1991; rev. ed. 1995): 9,000+

Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose (1997): 8,000+

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, trans. Judith H. McDowell (1986): 6,000+

Gerard J. Brault, The Song of Roland, 2 vols. (1978): 5,500+

Gerard J. Brault, La Chanson de Roland (1984): 4,000+

Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms (1982): 3,500+

Stanley Weintraub, Aubrey Beardsley (1976): 3,000+

John Cech, Angels and Wild Things (1991): 3,000+

Earl C. Haag, A Pennsylvania German Reader and Grammar (1982): 3,000+

James E. Miller Jr., T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977): 3,000+

Philip Baldi and Ronald N. Werth, eds., Readings in Historical Phonology (1978): 2,500+

Juan Ruiz, Book of True Love, trans. Saralyn R. Daly (1978): 2,500+

Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (1992): 2,500+

Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism (1992): 2,500+

Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (1988): 2,500+

James L. Potter, Robert Frost Handbook (1980): 2,500+

Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999): 2,000+

Bernard Oldsey, Hemingway’s Hidden Craft (1979): 2,000+

Brian Johnston, The Ibsen Cycle (1992): 2,000+

Harrison T. Meserole, ed., American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1986): 2,000+

Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (1991): 2,000+

Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles (1995): 2,000+

Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of “Leaves of Grass” (1994): 2,000+

James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (1980): 2,000+

Elizabeth Phillips, Emily Dickinson (1988): 2,000+

“Most university presses are a labor of love, and none more so than those like the Penn State University Press, which has been publishing outstanding books by literary scholars for the past half-century. For every ‘best seller’ it publishes (which in this instance means a book that sells more than 2,000 copies), the Press has published dozens that, even while they are of genuine scholarly importance, are bought only by libraries and by a handful of specialists. This is true dedication to the spread of humanistic knowledge. I applaud the Penn State Press for its new initiative in digital publishing in the field of Romance studies, which will allow it to continue producing outstanding books in the literary scholarly field that would be economically unfeasible to publish in the traditional way.”

—Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University