Rocky Mountain Review

Volume 62, Number 2
FALL 2008

CONTENTS

Articles | Forum | Reviews


Articles

Martin Montanus as Entertainer and Social Critic

Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona

Contrary to common assumptions, sixteenth-century German literature contains numerous collections of Schwänke: that is, hilarious, entertaining, didactic, but ultimately epistemological short stories. The laughter that the authors evoke intends to teach, but also to illuminate and to help the audience to grasp fundamental aspects of their lives. This finds strong confirmation in the humorous tales by Martin Montanus who obviously cared little about theological issues that seemingly dominated that century; instead he offered delightful, skillfully developed Schwänke in which he exposed people's weakness, foolishness, failures, and foibles. Because of the strategic employment of laughter, however, the recipient is invited to join the learning process and to recognize basic elements of human life.



Forum

An Interdisciplinary Examination of U.S. Racism
from Mismeasure of Man to Invisible Man

Carol Anelli
Washington State University

Coming Soon.


Reviews

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
Reviewer: Cindy Carlson

Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing, by Stephan Füssel
Reviewer: Cliff Toliver

Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology, ed. Peter C. Mancall
Reviewer: McKenna Rose

Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, by W.A. Speck
Reviewer: Brian C. Cooney

New Frontiers in Early American Studies
      Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies, ed. Mary C. Carruth
      The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England, by Matthew P. Brown

Reviewer: Doreen Alvarez Saar

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, by Wayne Franklin
Reviewer: Michael Pringle

Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, by Brian Higgins and Herschel Parker
Reviewer: Sura P. Rath

Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age, by Harold K. Bush, Jr.
Reviewer: Jeffrey W. Miller

Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Lesjak
Reviewer: Jessica Webb

Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind, by David Alan Richards
Reviewer: Robert Sargent Fay

Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde, by Paul Fortunato
Reviewer: Catherine R. Mintler

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body, by Oliver S. Buckton
Reviewer: Jack W. Shear

Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History, by Amelie Hastie
Reviewer: Pamela T. Washington

Lovers & Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961, by Gary Richards
Reviewer: Erin Clair

The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau, by Robert Ziegler
Reviewer: Barbara Petrosky

Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, by Peter Boxall
Reviewer: Randy Laist

Writing the Southwest, ed. David King Dunaway and Sara Spurgeon
Reviewer: Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

Hot Coffee and Cold Truth: Living and Writing in the West, ed. W.C. Jameson
Reviewer: Marja Mogk

Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature, ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes
Reviewer: Liana M. Silva

The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, by Nikolas Rose
Reviewer: Troy Urquhart

Everything You Need to Know About Creative Writing (but knowing isn't everything...), by Heather Leach and Robert Graham
Reviewer: Helynne H. Hansen

Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity, by Lisa Magaña
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal

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