Rocky Mountain E-Review 
of Language and Literature

Volume 61, Number 1
SPRING 2007


Articles

Quantitative Verse, Bookselling, and Thomas Campion's 
Observations in the Art of English Poesie

Barclay Green 
Northern Kentucky University

Thomas Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) critiques the use of rhyme and meter in English poetry and develops the prosodic foundation for vernacular quantitative verse. However, the treatise also responds to what Campion saw as the unfortunate conditions under which learned, serious poets had to labor and reacts to the rise of print and the business of bookselling. Through close attention to the early chapters of Observations, we appreciate more fully the serious motivations behind the quantitative movement, expand our knowledge of Campion's contributions to it, and raise questions about how Elizabethan critics responded to changes in their culture's literary systems.


Larry Watson's Montana 1948
and Euroamerican Representation of Native/Euroamerican History

Peter L. Bayers 
Fairfield University

Like other recent films and texts, Larry Watson's Montana 1948 is preoccupied with the legacy of the U.S. conquest of Native America and the ongoing colonial relationship between the U.S. and Natives. But Montana 1948 also self-consciously calls attention to the problems endemic to Euroamerican efforts to "revision" Euroamerican/Native history. Watson suggests that at best most Euroamericans engage in shallow, self-congratulatory pieties to relieve themselves of guilt in regard to Native America, and that when it comes to telling stories about Euroamerican interaction with Indians, these stories are mired in tired Indian representations that mystify material history and the ongoing colonial status of Natives in the United States. Through his flawed narrator, Watson underscores that Euroamericans must be more rigorously self-critical as they engage questions of representation and their own deeply held colonial desires when telling history.


Faith, Hope and Service 
in Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel

Linda Naranjo-Huebl 
Calvin College

Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel navigates a difficult path celebrating service in a tradition -- Chicano Catholic culture -- that often valorizes the complete effacement or the martyrdom of women. The novel's protagonist wants to reject the traditional "angelic" role of a woman in a male-dominated culture and religious tradition while embracing the virtue of service that is also part of those cultures. By examining the diverse aspects of the order of angels that structure the book, one can track Soveida's personal growth, healing, and understanding of service as love of self and others.


The Desert Noir Detective Novels of Jon Talton

David William Foster 
Arizona State University

Jon Talton is one of the most interesting writers about Phoenix. By contrast to others who use Phoenix as a convenient setting for detective fiction, Talton uses this genre to interpret the past-as-present. In Dry Heat (2004), moreover, his narrative focuses on the contrasting fate of two famous Phoenix residential neighborhoods.


Forum

Multilingual Awareness through Travel

Albrecht Classen 
University of Arizona

The motivation to study one or more foreign languages can be vastly improved through a travel experience. But I propose a structured travel course through various European countries focusing on a specific topic, such as the history of the Middle Ages. As part of this travel experience, students also acquire basic knowledge of various languages and gain a new understanding of the wealth of linguistic differences in the global community. This article analyzes a questionnaire handed out to a group of students at the end of a three-week summer travel course and argues that a multi-language exposure can have tremendous, long-term effects on students because they gain a new degree of inspiration and motivation to acquire more than one, if not many, foreign languages.


Reviews

Dreaming the Great Brahmin: Tibetan Traditions of the Buddhist Poet-Saint Saraha, by Kurtis R. Schaeffer 
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson

Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves: The Search for the Hildebrandslied and the Willehalm Codex, by Opritsa D. Popa 
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior 
Reviewer: Robyn Malo

The Romance of the Rose Illuminated: Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, by Alcuin Blamires and Gail C. Holian 
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Les Femmes et la tradition littéraire, by Vicki Mistacco 
Reviewer: Jocelyne Le Ber

Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends, by Jody Enders

Reviewer: Joanne Craig

Writing from the Edge of the World: The Memoirs of Darién 1514-1527, by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, ed. and trans. G.F. Dille 
Reviewer: McKenna Rose

La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social Equality in Colonial Spanish America, by Jonathan D. Steigman 
Reviewer: José I. Suárez

More Recent Publications in Oxfordian Studies 
      The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Helen Heightsman Gordon 
      Oxford's Letters: The Letters of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, CD, read by Derek Jacobi 
      De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon, by William Farina 

Reviewer: Michael Delahoyde

Searching for Shakespeare, by Tarnya Cooper 
Reviewer: Joanne Craig

Approaches to Teaching Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, ed. Sue Lonoff and Terri A. Hasseler 
Reviewer: Véronique Machelidon

Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature, by Brady Harrison 
Reviewer: Amy T. Hamilton

The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, by Mary McAleer Balkun 
Reviewer: Michael Pringle

Stephen Crane Remembered, ed. Paul Sorrentino 
Reviewer: James W. Long

Proust in Love, by William C. Carter 
Reviewer: Catherine Marachi

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels, by Ryan Simmons 
Reviewer: Susana M. Morris

The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, by Lois Parkinson Zamora 
Reviewer: Matthew S. Landers

The Spaces of Violence, by James R. Giles 
Reviewer: Kyle Wiggins

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt 
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva

Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction, by Ian Gregson 
Reviewer: Mimi R. Gladstein

Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000, by Brian Baker 
Reviewer: Cindy A. McLeod

Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Danuta Borchardt 
Reviewer: David Thomas Holmberg

Soi-Disant: Life-Writing in French, ed. Juliana De Nooy et al. 
Reviewer: Helynne H. Hansen

La séduction policière: signes de croissance d'un genre réputé mineur: Pierre Magnan, Daniel Pennac et quelques autres, by Pierre Verdaguer 
Reviewer: Sophie Boyer

Ukraine's Orange Revolution, by Andrew Wilson 
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva

Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo, by Joseph Dewey 
Reviewer: Randy Laist

Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel, by James Annesley 
Reviewer: Aliza Atik

Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People, by John Hartigan, Jr. 
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson

A Research Guide for Undergraduate Students: English and American Literature, 6th ed. by Nancy L. Baker and Nancy Huling 
Reviewer: Michael C. Boecherer