Date of Award
12-1-2016
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
English
First Advisor
Kimberly Blaeser
Committee Members
Brenda Cardenas, Michael Wilson, Valerie Laken, Lindsay Timmerman
Keywords
Anticipatory Grief, Cancer, Ecology, Elegy, Motherhood, Poetry
Abstract
The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger body, house, and ecology.
Recommended Citation
Mueller, Erika Marie, "The Waiting House" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1394.
https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1394