Ruth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity
Ruth 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.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Department of English Language and Literature