Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 52, Number 2
Fall 1998
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Forum | Media Reviews | Book Reviews
Articles
Defoe and the Black Legend:
The Spanish Stereotype in A New Voyage Round the World
Kathryn Rummell
California Polytechnic State University
This piece investigates Defoe's use and manipulation of the Black Legend in this
1724 travel fiction. To some degree, the Black Legend created the stereotype of
the cruel, greedy, and barbarous Spaniard; to a much larger degree, the Black
Legend endorsed and perpetuated this stereotype in order to delegitimize Spain's
colonial power in the New World. Defoe was certainly aware of this stereotype and,
I argue, consciously drew upon it in A New Voyage. In particular, Defoe echoes
the anti-conquistador sentiments of Bartolome de Las Casas, a sixteenth-century
Dominican friar who was the self-proclaimed "Defender of the Indians."
This essay, then, illustrates the parallels between Las Casas' and Defoe's uses
of the Black Legend, and argues that Defoe's travel fiction is thinly-veiled
propaganda for the creation of an English colony in Chile.
The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity
of Hall's Ogilvy and Woolf's Rhoda
Michael Kramp
Washington State University
Throughout the early twentieth century, psychologists, medical doctors, and
sexologists debated and determined our modern understanding of the female
homosexual. Rooted in a dialectic between the theories of Sigmund Freud and
Havelock Ellis, the discourses of the lesbian emphasized the perversity and
deviancy of the homosexual woman. Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf engage
this discussion and offer two powerful fictional portraits of women who challenge
the developed notion of the lesbian as either a broken heterosexual or a mannish
woman. The characters of Hall and Woolf, moreover, resist the heterosexualization
of culture which mandates that individuals must be stable agents as either male
or female, heterosexual or homosexual.
Forum
The Cost of Career Equality:
A Personal Response to Academic Couples: Problems and Promises
Kristie A. Foell
Bowling Green State University
This piece relates one academic's personal experience of a commuting,
dual-career marriage to sociological analysis presented in the recent book,
Academic Couples: Problems and Promises. The book, summarized and reviewed here,
covers the history and social context of academic women and couples in America,
legal and institutional concerns about programs for hiring partners, and data on
the career success and scholarly productivity of academic couples. The article's
author finds that the studies in the book contextualize her own experience, but
do not address the emotional and social issues she observes as a wide-spread
phenomenon among commuting couples.
Media Reviews
Chaucer: Life and Times. CD-ROM
Reviewer: Michael Delahoyde
Book Reviews
Teaching Lives: Essays and Stories, by Wendy Bishop
Reviewer: Devan Cook
The Color of Melancholy: The Uses of Books in the Fourteenth Century, by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
Reviewer: Jerry Root
Chaucer's Rehersynges: The Performability of The Legend of Good Women, by William A. Quinn
Reviewer: Alexandra H. Olsen
Chaucer's Garden and the Language of Convention, by Laura Howes
Reviewer: Jeffrey Cain
"Renaissance" Talk: Ordinary Language and the Mystique of Critical Problems, by Stanley Stewart
Reviewer: Michael Richard Bonin
Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory Since the Renaissance, by Emerson R. Marks
Reviewer: Martin Bucco
Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland, by Deborah A. Symonds
Reviewer: Gaye McCollum
The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence, by Susan J. Navarette
Reviewer: Nichole A. Diederich
Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks, and Strategies of Post-Structuralist Criticism, by Bernard McGuirk
Reviewer: Jesse Aleman
Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, by John Fowles
Reviewer: James R. Aubrey
Shakespeare; the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt
Reviewer: Diane Parkin-Speer
Men Doing Feminism, ed. Tom Digby
Reviewer: Lois A. Marchino
Critical Confrontations; Literary Theories in Dialogue, by Meili Steele
Reviewer: Bernice Harris
Dialectical Readings: Three Types of Interpretation, by Stephen N. Dunning
Reviewer: Anne Foltz
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