Martin, Terry J.

Dr. Terry Martin is Professor of English at Baldwin-Wallace College. He earned his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1988. Prior to that, he taught at the Universidad Industrial de Santander and Centro Colombo Americano, both in Bucaramanga, Colombia. He is currently co-director of the Baldwin-Wallace College Seminar in Ecuador. Dr. Martin has published a variety of essays on 19th-century American literature, and he is currently writing a book on fatherhood.

La Loca De Gandoca / The Madwoman of Gandoca

2006 0-7734-5637-6
La Loca de Gandoca caused a national outcry in Costa Rica when it was published in 1992. It blew the whistle on a secret plot by government officials and private investors to develop the Gandoca-Manzanilla Wildlife Refuge, which is one of the most biologically diverse sites in the world and supposed to be protected by the Costa Rican constitution. The novel is the largely autobiographical account of Anacristina Rossi’s attempt to save the refuge from destruction. It is an inspirational story that shows what one brave, determined, self-reliant individual can do even against powerful vested interests. It is, at the same time, a fascinating exposé of the corrupt, labyrinthine and stonewalling government bureaucracy of Costa Rica, the popular American tourist destination, supposed by many to be a model of enlightened conservation and ecotourism. In addition, the novel is a probing ecofeminist critique of the Western paradigm of development, one which sensitively and poetically explores the relationship between humanity and nature.

Rhetorical Deception in the Short Fiction of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville

1998 0-7734-8240-7
This study analyzes an innovative rhetorical strategy employed in certain of the most challenging and frequently misunderstood stories of the American Renaissance, including ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘Benito Cereno.’ In these stories, the reader is rhetorically beguiled into sharing the point of view of a character who is self-deluded and implicated in crime, yet whose true nature is never explicitly revealed, except through the works’ latent symbolic structure. Although the study draws on the insights of previous scholarship, it seeks to offer original readings of these stories, identifying them as a significant sub-genre of the modern short story.