Rocky Mountain Review
Volume 62, Number 1
SPRING 2008
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Translatio and the Constructs
of a Roman Nation in Virgil's Aeneid
Kimberly K. Bell
Sam Houston State University
This essay examines Virgil's use of rhetorical topos known as translatio
studii et imperii (the transferal of culture and empire) in his epic
Aeneid. This topos, a literary strategy whereby an author borrows
from and adapts the cultural and political authority of one culture for his
own political, historical, or aesthetic purposes, is utilized by Virgil to
construct a national identity for Rome on par with that of ancient Greece.
Virgil achieves such political ends by creating distinct parallels between
his hero Aeneas and the princeps Augustus.
McTeague's Gilded Prison
David McGlynn
Lawrence University
While a number of critics note the presence of the pet canary that McTeague keeps
in a little gilt cage by the window, most elide its importance, treating the bird
and its gilded cage as either unintentionally placed or as an otherwise unremarkable
aspect of the novel's setting. But the canary provides the key to understanding
McTeague's transformation from a "sluggish," yet "docile" dentist to a violent
transient who beats his wife to death and makes off with her savings. The novel
aligns the canary chittering in its little gilt prison with McTeague's middle-class
life in San Francisco, revealing McTeague's life as one imprisoned by the city.
I turn away from the popular arguments of biological determinism often used to
explain McTeague's degenerate behavior and to categorize American Naturalism
and instead view McTeague as a critique of the folly of urban, middle-class life
in which the desire to own frivolous objects incites confusion, greed, and eventually
brutal acts of violence.
Forum
Leslie Norris and Exile
James Prothero
Santa Ana College
Less than two years after his death, the books of Welsh poet and resident of
Utah, Leslie Norris, are close to going out of print. Norris' powerful and
Romantic poetry and short stories do not deserve such a fate. Like Robert
Frost, Norris found his poetic voice in exile. Norris left a successful
teaching career in Britain in middle age to focus his life on being a poet.
After a series of one-year appointments as writer in residence, his Brigham
Young University job became permanent and allowed him to develop a voice
that at once is full of the imagery of his Welsh past and of his adopted
Mountain West home. This essay argues that exile and the sense of exile are
quintessential American traits, and thus that Norris had unwittingly become
a distinctly American poet. His work resonates with the nature writing coming
out of the West in the late 20th century. Norris is one of the finest voices
in Welsh and American literature and should not be consigned to literary
oblivion.
Reviews
Approaches to Teaching the
Song of Roland, ed. William W. Kibler and Leslie Zarker Morgan
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen
Isabelle of France: Capetian Sanctity
and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century, by Sean L. Field
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen
The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One
in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry, by Sarah Kay
Reviewer: Wendolyn Weber
Voice in Motion: Staging Gender,
Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, by Gina Bloom
Reviewer: Liberty Stanavage
Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.D.
Nuttall
Reviewer: Kirk Rasmussen
A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega
and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe, by Richard Helgerson
Reviewer: Heather C. Easterling
The Captive's Position: Female Narrative, Male
Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England, by Teresa A. Toulouse
Reviewer: Randy Jasmine
Love, Desire and Transcendence
in French Literature: Deciphering Eros, by Paul Gifford
Reviewer: Catherine Marachi
Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies:
The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France,
by Anne E. Duggan
Reviewer: Aleksandra Gruzinska
Beaumarchais in Seville,
by Hugh Thomas
Reviewer: Barbara Petrosky
Frankenstein, A Cultural History,
by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
Reviewer: Jacob Hughes
Women and Gender in the American West,
ed. Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks
Reviewer: Theda Wrede
Imperial Masochism: British Fiction,
Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich
Reviewer: Susan E. Cook
Franklin Evans or The Inebriate, A Tale of the
Times, by Walt Whitman, ed. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler
Reviewer: Alex Wulff
The Fin de Siècle Poem:
English Literary Culture in the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow
Reviewer: Anthony Flinn
Persephone Unbound: Dionysian Aesthetics
in the Works of Anna de Noailles, by Catherine Perry
Reviewer: Pamela Park
A History of Austrian Literature
1918-2000, ed. Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva
Complete Poems: Claude McKay,
ed. William J. Maxwell
Reviewer: Greg Grewell
The Unfree French: Life Under the
Occupation, by Richard Vinen
Reviewer: Jocelyne Le Ber
Tennessee Williams' Notebooks,
by Margaret Bradham Thornton
Reviewer: Susan Savage Lee
Romanticism Comes of Age
and Speaker's Meaning, by Owen Barfield
Reviewer: Daniel Smitherman
Twentieth-Century Fiction by
Irish Women: Nation and Gender, by Heather Ingman
Reviewer: Jessica Gildersleeve
Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare,
ed. Scott L. Newstock
Reviewer: Susan Nyikos
The Miraculous Lie: Lope de Aguirre
and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Historical Novel,
by Bart L. Lewis
Reviewer: José I. Suárez
From Surrealism to Less-Exquisite Cadavers:
Léo Malet and the Evolution of the French "Roman Noir,"
by Michelle Emanuel
Reviewer: Catherine Marachi
No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint
and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, by Jay Ellis
Reviewer: Craig Monk
Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief,
by Jesse Kavadlo
Reviewer: Randy Laist
The Remembered Earth: An Anthology
of Contemporary Native American Literature, ed. Geary Hobson
Reviewer: RosaMaria Chacon
Wisdom Sits in Places:
Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, by Keith Basso
Reviewer: Isabelle Sabau and Mircea Sabau
Italian Through Film: The Classics,
by Antonello Borra and Christina Pausini
Reviewer: Susan Joseph
La France et la Francophone:
Conversations with Native Speakers, by Mary Anne O'Neil
Reviewer: Caren Barnezet Parrish
Spanish for Mental Health Professionals:
A Step by Step Book, by Deborah E. Bender et al.
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Spanish for Dental Professionals:
A Step by Step Book, by Deborah E. Bender et al.
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction:
First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars, ed. Judith H. Anderson
and Christine R. Farris
Reviewer: Cynthia Cavanaugh
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