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In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton. Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders' introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes ';the mythical ideal biographer,' an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.

Explores the emergence of a body of texts about relics transported from Constantinople to the West as a after the Fourth Crusade, and the role of these texts in the development of Venice's civic identity in the thirteenth century.

Examines seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome. Focuses on questions of historical context and criticism, including the interaction of theory and practice, the creative roles of sculptors and patrons, the relationship of sculpture to antique models and to contemporary painting, and contextual meaning and reception.

A biography of the celebrated nineteenth-century author George Sand. Examines her public image, her relationships with her husband, lovers, and children, and her lifelong political commitment.

Investigates how students in a clinical legal education program learned to advocate effectively and ethically with clients abused by intimate partners. Demonstrates the importance of valuing clients as experts in their own lives and as equal partners in decision making.

Explores the role of writer Gwendolyn Bennett as an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Includes Bennett's published and unpublished poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, letters, and artwork.

The first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolome de Las Casas's 1552 Confesionario. Explores its history and its guidelines for confessors administering the sacrament of confession to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed indigenous peoples.

Explores the role of writer Gwendolyn Bennett as an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Includes Bennett's published and unpublished poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, letters, and artwork.

Explores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday's life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music.

A comics anthology that illustrates the complicated and multiple experiences of human reproduction and explores comics within the growing field of graphic medicine.

Examines art and literature of the Americas through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Demonstrates how modernism and the avant-garde were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation.

Explores the myriad ways that people in the nineteenth century grappled with questions of learning, belonging, civic participation, and deliberation. Focuses on the dynamics of gender, race, region, and religion, and how individuals and groups often excluded from established institutions developed knowledge useful for public life.

Analyzes the tensions within the contemporary Anglican Communion, addresses the theological arguments and social forces involved, and explores the dynamics of religious conflict in a global era.

Examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.

A collection of essays on nature observations at the Shaver's Creek Environmental Center, focusing on deepening the connection of personal and cultural meanings to a specific place through a process of sustained close attention.

Explores the work of the astrologer-physician and Anglican rector Richard Napier (1559-1634). Examines Napier's medical and magical practices in their larger context and shows how the physician incorporated both astral and ritual magic into his medicine.

English translation of an anonymous thirteenth-century French poem in which a woman desperate to bear a child appeals to the devil for help. Originally written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, this translation uses free verse.

Explores the contributions of Evan Pugh (1828-1864), founding president of today's Pennsylvania State University, in quickly building it into America's first scientifically based agricultural college.

A narrative history of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Explores the court's notable decisions and why they matter in the broader context of Pennsylvania and American law and history.

Explores the ways in which visual imagery was used for animal advocacy campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways in which these images were created, circulated, and consumed in a wide range of cultural contexts.

An English translation of Benjamin Hoffmann's French monograph L'Amerique posthume. Examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in eighteenth-century French literature.

Examines U.S. obscenity trials in the early twentieth century and how they framed a wide-ranging debate about the printed word's power to deprave, offend, and shape behavior.

Recounts the histories of German clockwork automata, which were given as gifts and collected in the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A collection of essays investigating photography's role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.

Explores the formation of public and private collections of Spanish Colonial and modern Latin American art throughout the United States, and the impact of the ever-changing political landscape of Latin American countries.

A multidisciplinary interpretation of representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances, and how these texts link magic, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. By representing supernatural marvels in vivid visual detail, these texts encourage reactions of wonder that have moral effects within and beyond the narrative.

Focuses on costumbrismo, a cultural trend in Latin America and Spain toward representing local customs, types, and scenes of everyday life in the visual arts and literature, to examine the shifting terms of Mexican identity in the nineteenth century.

A guide, geared toward all levels of botanical knowledge, to identifying over 300 species of grasses found in four physiographic provinces within the Mid-Atlantic Region.

Studies the illustration of Revelation in manuscripts from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Examines how twenty-five of the most important illustrated Apocalypses illustrate the biblical text and interpret it for diverse audiences.

Focuses on Eugene Delacroix's fascination with the idea of civilization and the ways this idea informed the artist's writing, murals, and paintings of North Africa and animals.