Rocky Mountain ReviewVolume 62, Number 1 Articles Translatio and the Constructs of a Roman Nation in Virgil's Aeneid Kimberly K. Bell 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. David McGlynn 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 James Prothero 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 Isabelle of France: Capetian Sanctity and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century, by Sean L. Field The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry, by Sarah Kay Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, by Gina Bloom Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.D. Nuttall A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe, by Richard Helgerson The Captive's Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England, by Teresa A. Toulouse Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature: Deciphering Eros, by Paul Gifford Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France, by Anne E. Duggan Beaumarchais in Seville, by Hugh Thomas Frankenstein, A Cultural History, by Susan Tyler Hitchcock Women and Gender in the American West, ed. Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich Franklin Evans or The Inebriate, A Tale of the Times, by Walt Whitman, ed. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler The Fin de Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture in the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow Persephone Unbound: Dionysian Aesthetics in the Works of Anna de Noailles, by Catherine Perry A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000, ed. Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson Complete Poems: Claude McKay, ed. William J. Maxwell The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen Tennessee Williams' Notebooks, by Margaret Bradham Thornton Romanticism Comes of Age and Speaker's Meaning, by Owen Barfield Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender, by Heather Ingman Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, ed. Scott L. Newstok The Miraculous Lie: Lope de Aguirre and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Historical Novel, by Bart L. Lewis From Surrealism to Less-Exquisite Cadavers: Léo Malet and the Evolution of the French "Roman Noir," by Michelle Emanuel No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, by Jay Ellis Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, by Jesse Kavadlo The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature, ed. Geary Hobson Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, by Keith Basso Italian Through Film: The Classics, by Antonello Borra and Christina Pausini La France et la Francophone: Conversations with Native Speakers, by Mary Anne O'Neil Spanish for Mental Health Professionals: A Step by Step Book, by Deborah E. Bender et al. Spanish for Dental Professionals: A Step by Step Book, by Deborah E. Bender et al. Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars, ed. Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris
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