Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness

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Cornell University Press, 5 de jul. 2018 - 256 pàgines

In Dreams of the Burning Child, David Lee Miller explores the uncanny persistence of filial sacrifice as a motif in English literature and its classical and biblical antecedents. He combines strikingly original reinterpretations of the Aeneid, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, and Dombey and Son with perceptive accounts of dreams found in memoirs, poems, and psychoanalytic texts.

Miller looks closely at the grisly fantasy of the sacrifice of sons as it is depicted in classical epic, early modern drama, the nineteenth-century novel, the postcolonial novel, the lyric, the funeral elegy, sacred scriptures, and psychoanalytic theory. He also draws examples from painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture into a witty and engaging discussion that ranges from the binding of Isaac to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and from questions of literary history to the dilemmas of patriarchal masculinity.

 

Continguts

The Body of Fatherhood
1
1 The Deified Father and the Sacrificial Son
15
The History of a Wound
52
3 Witnessing as Theater in Shakespeare
92
A Dead Hand at a Baby
130
This Moving Dream
160
A Return to the Crossroads
195
Bibliography
223
Index
235
Copyright

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Sobre l'autor (2018)

David Lee Miller is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 'Faerie Queene' as well as coeditor of several books, including The Production of English Renaissance Culture, also from Cornell.

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