Browsing by Author "Warner, Sarah Jane"
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- ItemOpen AccessRuth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity(2012) Warner, Sarah Jane; Driver, Dorothy; Young, Sandra; Distiller, NatashaRuth Miller's poetry was written between 1940 and the year of her death in 1969, and is published in three volumes, Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968), and Ruth Miller: Poems Prose Plays (1990). In this thesis, I modify the concept of literary maternity suggested by Joan Metelerkamp in her article, “Ruth Miller: Father's Law or Mother's Lore?” (1992). My approach is informed by a model of literary maternity that is not defined in terms of a female figure but in terms of a relation between the earliest parent and the child, or what is referred to in psychoanalytic terms as the preoedipal relation. My thesis is concerned to show how Miller's poetry and a theory on the maternal function of literature reinterpret each other; it includes a consideration of Miller's literary legacy, the critical literature describing her oeuvre, and the issues of continuity and authority that arise in the context of literary publication.