- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Indiana University Press (1 Jan 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0253213797
- ISBN-13: 978-0253213792
- Product Dimensions: 14 x 1.5 x 21.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,067,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"[The book] reflects a process of maturity that has gone beyond good-girl anger at parents and teachers ... Miller's use of the memoir form offers a new model of serious criticism, and a way of imagining community through 'bonds of paper' as well as 'bonds of blood.'" --Elaine Showalter, London Review of Books "Miller's book is a discerning study of a contemporary subgenre: the memoir about dead parents... Miller is brilliant at unravelling ... complicated and agonising tangles of fairness and anger. The use of memoir to convert deep veins of resetnment into acceptance, if not forgiveness, is the core of Miller's book ... " --Alix Kates Shulman, Women's Review of Books With her own experimental form--part criticism, part autobiography--Nancy K. Miller reminds us that when we read stories about other people's lives, we see our own lives in new ways and rewrite our own stories." --Alice Kaplan, Duke University "Nancy K. Miller counterpoints lyrical introspection about her own grief with critical insight into contemporary memoirs. In the process she produces astonishingly poignant revelations about what it means to live with a dying parent, how it feels to survive after a great loss." --Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar co-authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women "In Bequest and Betrayal, an esteemed literary scholar speaks to a wider audience, reminding us that at its most basic and most powerful, reading is not just what we do with books, but how we live our lives, trying always to learn from the stories we find ourselves in." --Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Product Description
How do we live with our parents after their death? How do we tell their story when they are gone? These questions are the subject of Nancy K. Miller's moving new book, "Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death". Melding the details of her own experience with the familial biographies of well-known contemporary writers, Miller recreates a common experience - the loss of a father or a mother - and exposes the often tortuous paths of mourning and attachment that we follow in the wake of loss. In the process, she offers pieces of personal history, revealing the mixed emotions provoked by her mother's sudden death from cancer and her father's painful struggle with Parkinson's disease. Memoirs about the loss of parents show how enmeshed in the family plot we have been and the price of our complicity in its stories.The death of parents forces us to rethink our lives, to reread ourselves. We read for what we need to find. Sometimes, we also find what we didn't know we needed. Shifting back and forth between literature and life, Miller engages with other writers but also speaks to readers for whom these stories of loss will be poignantly familiar. What emerges is an innovative form of life-writing - the autobiography of a New York Jewish daughter, a childless woman, a literary critic - created in complex counterpoint both to contemporary memoirs and to our culture's scenarios of high-tech dying."Bequest and Betrayal" works through the passionate ambivalence of generational bonds and builds to its final chapter, an intimate portrait of Miller's father, a lawyer facing the end of his life and career. Reading the fragmentary pages of her father's diaries, Miller records the crisis of middle-class family and charts the steady decline of a man's body and mind. Losing parents and writing about their absence leads us to acknowledge our own mortality, to think anew about how we want to live the rest of our lives. "Bequest and Betrayal" explores the complicated ways in which mourning the loss of parents ultimately produces a story we can live with, a story that lets us move on.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
The origins of this book are inseparable from the loss of my parents. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
The origins of this book are inseparable from the loss of my parents. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
untitled
26 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback
This is the first work of literary criticism that I read like a novel; I simply couldn't put it down. By combining literary criticism and autobiography, Miller pushes the boundaries of literary criticism in productive ways and forces us to rethink the field. Finally a book I can recommend and give to all my friends, regardless of whether they are academics.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Scholarly & readable-- what a combination!
16 Sep 2000
Format:Hardcover
Nancy K. Miller is one of my favorite contemporary feminist theorists. This study of several "Memoirs" written by adult children of deceased parents kept me interested in ways that scholarship often does not (I usually read it for work, not pleasure-- this book combined the two). With this book, you should also read Maus : A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, because one of the most fascinating chapters is a study of Spiegelman's gripping Holocaust narratives. Autobiography shapes all writing in ways that critics are really just beginning to explore-- Dr. Miller is at the forefront of this field and deservedly so.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Families & Parents
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Health Issues > Aging
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Health Issues > Death & Bereavement
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Self Help
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism
- Books > Reference > Publishing & Books > Authorship
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology > Family & Social Groups > Death & Dying
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
