Books published by publisher U. Pennsylvania Press

Jessamyn McAllister is a natural-born book detective. She began training at an early age with her grandfather, who had an illustrious career at the Federal Book Agency. Gifted with an exceptional memory and heightened sensory perception, she graduated early from the Academy in order to join the ranks as a member of the Youth Brigade. For an FBA agent like Jess, going inside a book is routine. Sometimes characters balk or change their minds and need to be persuaded to follow their scripts. But the case in the personal library of Professor Annabel Lee is anything but typical. Characters there are actually leaving their books and trespassing into others. If this is a virus, it’s endangering the whole paper-and-ink universe. Jess will need to deal with villains and mischief-makers inside and outside the book world in order to set things right. For book lovers of all ages.

Bestselling novelist Bette Bao Lord, author of Spring Moon, is connected by infinite threads of family & experience to China. Born in Shanghai in 1938, she emigrated to America at the age of 8. Returning to China as the wife of the U.S. ambassador, she stayed to witness the blossoming of the fragile 'China Spring' of 1989. Here she pieces together a half century of turbulent Chinese history -- through her own memories & the moving stories of men & women (many of necessity remain anonymous) from all strata of Chinese society. This beautifully written book evokes the tenderness & violence, traditions & iconoclasm of China & conveys the dignity of the Chinese people.

The artistic genius of Michelangelo (1475-1564) is beyond question. One the most important figures in the history of art, his monumental paintings in the Sistine Chapel, his sculpture David in Florence, and his Pietà at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome are among the greatest human achievements of all time and remain the most visited and admired works of art in the world. Michelangelo's life has been the subject of many biographies over the centuries, but it was not until the appearance of John Addington Symonds's The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, in 1893, that a biographer had complete access to the artist's family archives.The Buonarroti archives were to be available to the public with the passing of the last family member, but even when that event occurred, in 1858, material from the archives remained closely guarded and only fragments emerged through the hands of family friends. The Italian government, predisposed to Symonds for his impeccable scholarship of Renaissance art, gave Symonds full access to the Buonarroti archives in the 1880s, the first independent scholar so honored.With the ability to consult the massive amount of material in the archives, Symonds produced the first documented, and considered by many still to be the best, biography of Michelangelo. Symonds's expertise as a historian and critic gives added depth to this biography, and it is here that the public first learned that translations of Michelangelo's poetry had been altered to opaque the artist's sexuality. Yet this great work, the last of Symonds's life, has largely been forgotten by students of Michelangelo. In this new edition, the first in more than fifty years, preeminent art historian Creighton E. Gilbert reintroduces Symonds's masterful study of Michelangelo to a new audience through a discussion of the historical context in which the biography appeared, a biographical sketch of Symonds, an openly gay man who worked rigorously to evaluate and promote the contributions of gay artists and scholars to mainstream life, and concludes with an appreciation of The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, for its scholarly and literary merits, as an account of the most brilliant painter and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance.

Hidden under layers of error and corruption, the original version of Sister Carrie has finally emerged. The American classic that has been read in English courses for many decades is not the text as Dreiser wrote it. Even before it was submitted to Doubleday, Page and Company, the manuscript of Sister Carrie had been cut and censored. Dreiser's wife Sara-­-nicknamed "Jug"—and his friend Arthur Henry persuaded the author to make many changes. Both Jug and Henry felt that the novel was too bleak, the sexuality too explicit, the philosophy too intense.In a description of Carrie, for instance, Dreiser had written, "Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet." Apparently this passage was too intimate for Jug, for she revised it to: "Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy." Jug and Henry urged Dreiser to make his bleak ending more equivocal. He changed it, but Jug, still dissatisfied, rewrote his second ending. Her version was published with the first edition and has appeared with every edition since printed. Doubleday, Page and Company further insisted that all real names—of theaters, bars, streets, actors, etc.—be changed to fictitious ones.The editors of this new edition have gone back to the original handwritten manuscript as well as to the typescript that went to the publisher and have restored the text of Sister Carrie to its original purity. Errors of typists and printers have been corrected; cut and censored passages have been reinstated. Not only have original names been restored, but the Pennsylvania edition includes maps, illustrations, and historical notes that further identify these people and places. The edition also includes a selected textual apparatus for the scholar. The characters are significantly altered in this new text: Carrie has more emotional depth, conscience, and sexuality; Hurstwood shows more passion; Drouet is a bit less likable; Ames is a bit more vulnerable. With the inclusion of the original ending, Dreiser's vision becomes- more bleak and deterministic: In its expanded and purified form, Sister Carrie is more tragic and infinitely richer; in effect it is a new work of art by one of the major American novelists of this century.

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American—rather than specifically Native American—literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored.In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination.Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation.The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave—Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period, spanning the close of the medieval and the dawn of early modern eras, more eloquently conveyed than in Capgrave's works. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century is the first book to explore the major themes of Capgrave's writings and to relate those themes to fifteenth-century political and cultural debates. Focusing on Capgrave's later works, especially those in English and addressed to lay audiences, it teases out thematic threads that are closely interwoven in Capgrave's Middle English oeuvre: piety, intellectualism, gender, and social responsibility. It refutes the still-prevalent view of Capgrave as a religious and political reactionary and shows, rather, that he used traditional genres to promote his own independent viewpoint on some of the most pressing controversies of his day, including debates over vernacular theology, orthodoxy and dissent, lay (and particularly female) spirituality, and the state of the kingdom under Henry VI.The book situates Capgrave as a figure both in the vibrant literary culture of East Anglia and in European intellectual history. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England and will interest students of hagiography, religious and cultural history, and Lancastrian politics and society.

VOLUME 2 of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, "containing a faithful account of the forutnes, misfortunes, uprisings, downfallings and complete career of the Nickleby Family." This is chapters XXXIV to LXV of the original Dickens serialized story, Nicholas Nickleby, as it appeared in "The Nickleby Advertiser." This book recreates the series in its original form, including the advertisments that appeared in the Advertiser.

Although world-famous for his novels Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser was also highly accomplished in journalism, autobiography, and travel writing. In 1919, having recently accepted the publishing contract of a new publisher, Boni and Liveright, Dreiser proposed to publish a "book of characters" that would collect twelve biographical sketches of individuals who were major influences on Dreiser, both as a man and as a writer. The resulting narratives combine the best attributes of the character sketch, the autobiography, and the short story into miniature masterpieces of prose.The men profiled in Twelve Men are a diverse and colorful group: from Dreiser's equally famous brother, the songwriter Paul Dresser ("My Brother Paul"), to the entirely obscure railroad foreman Michael Burke ("The Mighty Rourke"), on whose work crew Dreiser had labored in 1903. The twelve narratives are compelling portraits of the men portrayed, but they also reveal many insights into Dreiser's own life and work. These factors elevate the significance of Twelve Men to a level consistent with other major works in the Dreiser canon.

1922 First Edition published by Penn with illustrations by Frank Schoonover. Black cloth boards with gilt lettering and color pasted illustration to front. Front lower corner slightly bumped. Others and spine show little wear. Front slightly loose from FFEP. Christmas dedication FFEP. Tissue guard to full color illustration opposite title page. Pages are clean with slight age tanning to edges. A nice copy of this beautifully illustrated edition. Ships from the US next day.