Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature

Volume 61, Number 1
SPRING 2007

Articles

Quantitative Verse, Bookselling, and Thomas Campion's
Observations in the Art of English Poesie

Barclay Green
Northern Kentucky University

Thomas Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) critiques the use of rhyme and meter in English poetry and develops the prosodic foundation for vernacular quantitative verse. However, the treatise also responds to what Campion saw as the unfortunate conditions under which learned, serious poets had to labor and reacts to the rise of print and the business of bookselling. Through close attention to the early chapters of Observations, we appreciate more fully the serious motivations behind the quantitative movement, expand our knowledge of Campion's contributions to it, and raise questions about how Elizabethan critics responded to changes in their culture's literary systems.

Larry Watson's Montana 1948
and Euroamerican Representation of Native/Euroamerican History

Peter L. Bayers
Fairfield University

Like other recent films and texts, Larry Watson's Montana 1948 is preoccupied with the legacy of the U.S. conquest of Native America and the ongoing colonial relationship between the U.S. and Natives. But Montana 1948 also self-consciously calls attention to the problems endemic to Euroamerican efforts to "revision" Euroamerican/Native history. Watson suggests that at best most Euroamericans engage in shallow, self-congratulatory pieties to relieve themselves of guilt in regard to Native America, and that when it comes to telling stories about Euroamerican interaction with Indians, these stories are mired in tired Indian representations that mystify material history and the ongoing colonial status of Natives in the United States. Through his flawed narrator, Watson underscores that Euroamericans must be more rigorously self-critical as they engage questions of representation and their own deeply held colonial desires when telling history.

Faith, Hope and Service
in Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel

Linda Naranjo-Huebl
Calvin College

Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel navigates a difficult path celebrating service in a tradition -- Chicano Catholic culture -- that often valorizes the complete effacement or the martyrdom of women. The novel's protagonist wants to reject the traditional "angelic" role of a woman in a male-dominated culture and religious tradition while embracing the virtue of service that is also part of those cultures. By examining the diverse aspects of the order of angels that structure the book, one can track Soveida's personal growth, healing, and understanding of service as love of self and others.

The Desert Noir Detective Novels of Jon Talton

David William Foster
Arizona State University

Jon Talton is one of the most interesting writers about Phoenix. By contrast to others who use Phoenix as a convenient setting for detective fiction, Talton uses this genre to interpret the past-as-present. In Dry Heat (2004), moreover, his narrative focuses on the contrasting fate of two famous Phoenix residential neighborhoods.

Forum

Multilingual Awareness through Travel

Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona

The motivation to study one or more foreign languages can be vastly improved through a travel experience. But I propose a structured travel course through various European countries focusing on a specific topic, such as the history of the Middle Ages. As part of this travel experience, students also acquire basic knowledge of various languages and gain a new understanding of the wealth of linguistic differences in the global community. This article analyzes a questionnaire handed out to a group of students at the end of a three-week summer travel course and argues that a multi-language exposure can have tremendous, long-term effects on students because they gain a new degree of inspiration and motivation to acquire more than one, if not many, foreign languages.

Reviews

Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha, by Kurtis R. Schaeffer
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson

Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves: The Search for the Hildebrandslied and the Willehalm Codex, by Opritsa D. Popa
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior
Reviewer: Robyn Malo

The Romance of the Rose Illuminated: Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, by Alcuin Blamires and Gail C. Holian
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Les Femmes et la tradition littéraire, by Vicki Mistacco
Reviewer: Jocelyne Le Ber

Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends, by Jody Enders

Reviewer: Joanne Craig

Writing from the Edge of the World: The Memoirs of Darién 1514-1527, by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, ed. and trans. G.F. Dille
Reviewer: McKenna Rose

La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America, by Jonathan D. Steigman
Reviewer: José I. Suárez

More Recent Publications in Oxfordian Studies
      The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Helen Heightsman Gordon
      Oxford's Letters: The Letters of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, CD, read by Derek Jacobi
      De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon, by William Farina
Reviewer: Michael Delahoyde

Searching for Shakespeare, by Tarnya Cooper
Reviewer: Joanne Craig