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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