Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 53, Number 2
Fall 1999
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Reviews
Articles
Katherine Gordon and the Art of Marriage Brokering
in Perkin Warbeck
Corinne Abate
Iona College
The title character of John Ford's masterpiece Perkin Warbeck suffers from an overwhelming concern with proving the
rightfulness of his claim upon the British throne. What this social climbing, self-made salesman needs, therefore, is a good
woman; "good" not in the sense of obedient, but economically and politically viable, powerfully connected to a social status
to which Perkin has no other legitimate access. The answer to Perkin's needs is Katherine Gordon, a princess and royal
relative of James IV of Scotland. Employing Gayle Rubin's anthropological trafficking theories, this article interrogates a
new approach to the traffic in women that will reveal, with specific reference to Perkin Warbeck, the center of power
Katherine creates in her successful empowerment of the domestic sphere, and one to which she allows Perkin access. It is
a delicious irony, therefore, that this discussion of necessary subsumption pertains to a man, engrossed with the idea of
kingship, and not to the indispensable woman upon whom he so heavily relies.
"A Curious Double Insight":
The Well of Loneliness and
Native American Alternative Gender Traditions
Tara Prince-Hughes
Pierce College
Although it has been widely interpreted and criticized as a lesbian novel, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness is
more accurately seen as the story of an alternatively gendered person. Just as two-spirit people in traditional Native
American cultures have assumed alternative gender identities by undertaking the dress, work, and behavior patterns
associated with the other gender, so Stephen Gordon attempts to assume a male gendered identity as defined by
Edwardian English culture. Reading the novel from this perspective clarifies the distinction between gender and
sexual orientation and recognizes the novel's own cultural context.
Hemingway's "Out of Season":
The Importance of Close Reading
Charles J. Nolan, Jr.
U.S. Naval Academy
A close reading of "Out of Season," the first story Hemingway wrote after the loss of his early manuscripts, makes clear his
basic talent as it reveals essential aspects of his artistry. The problems of gender relationships, the theory of omission, the
incommunicability at the heart of human interaction, the use of symbolic landscape, the choice of just the right word -- these
and other elements of Hemingway's craft manifest themselves clearly if we look line by line at this remarkable story.
"Innere Unruthe"?
Zehra Çirak and
Minority Literature Today
Marilya Veteto-Conrad
Northern Arizona University
The article discusses the work of Istanbul-born Berlin author
Zehra Çirak -- winner of the 1989 Adelbert von Chamiso
Förderpreis and the 1993 Hölderlinförderpreis
-- and her position vis-a-vis the controversial and occasionally
detrimental treatment by scholars and publishers of so-called
minority writers in the Federal Republic. Also examined is current
scholarship on minority writers and the advantages and disadvantages
of the approaches taken. The article focuses on literary quality
rather than on ethnic background, although the latter can be useful
to a degree, especially for reasons of categorization. Several
of Çirak's texts are analysed and discussed.
Reviews
Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms, by John G. Demaray
Reviewer: Jeanie Grant Moore
Approaches to Teaching Lafayette's The Princess of Clèves, ed. Faith E. Beasley and Katharine Ann Jensen
Reviewer: Helynne H. Hansen
British Romanticism
England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case
of Romantic Historicism, by James Chandler
Wordsworth and the Victorians, by Stephen Gill
The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style, by Tom Paulin
Reviewer: J. Mark Smith
Among Other Things: A Description of the Novel, by Terrence Doody
Reviewer: Patricia Linton
By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine's Late Songs and Reflections, by Roger F. Cook
Reviewer: Eva Ludwiga Szalay
Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German
Novelists of America, by Jeffrey L. Sammons
Reviewer: Craig W. Nickisch
A Doll House. Based on the Play by Henrik Ibsen
CD-ROM
Reviewer: Kim Andersen
Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, ed. James M. Hutchisson
Reviewer: William T. Hamilton
Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut
Reviewer: George Bridges
Caught: The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic, by Karl Gernot Kuehn
Reviewer: Gerald A. Fetz
Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison, by Gurleen Grewal
Reviewer: Madonne M. Miner
The Last of the African Kings, by Maryse Condé, trans. Richard Philcox
Reviewer: Paula K. Sato
Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women's Lives, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Reviewer: Megan Simpson
Artistry in Native American Myths, by Karl Kroeber
Reviewer: Linda Lizut Helstern
Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship, ed. Heidi Byrnes
Reviewer: Christine Anton
En route
CD-ROM
Reviewer: Lars Erickson
Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies, by Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield
Reviewer: Shawn Alfrey
