David Lee Miller (born 1951) is a scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of English and

Comparative Literature Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across language, linguistic, national, geographic, and discipline, disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role ...

at the

University of South Carolina The University of South Carolina (USC, SC, or Carolina) is a Public university, public research university in Columbia, South Carolina, United States. Founded in 1801 as South Carolina College, It is the flagship of the University of South Car ...

in Columbia. His works include ''The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queen'', (Princeton UP, 1988); ''Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness'' (Cornell UP, 2003); three edited books; and about two dozen refereed articles that have appeared in scholarly journals such as ''Modern Language Quarterly'', ''English Literary History'', and ''Publications of the Modern Language Association''. He is one of four general editors of ''The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser'', a new scholarly edition under contract to

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

. Miller's work has been especially devoted to the canon of

Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser (; – 13 January 1599 Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.) was an English poet best known for ''The Faerie Queene'', an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the House of Tudor, Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is re ...

, a contemporary of Shakespeare's whose ''Faerie Queene'' is considered one of the two or three greatest

epic poems Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film defined by the spectacular presentation of human drama on a grandiose scale Epic(s) ...

in the language. Spenser was the subject of ''The Poem's Two Bodies'' in 1988, and Miller is helping to prepare a new scholarly edition of the English poet. In many of the articles, particularly in ''Dreams of the Burning Child'', Miller ranges through ancient, early modern, and modern literatures and through both popular and high cultures to demonstrate the central thesis that Western culture is fixated on the sacrifice of sons as a means of shoring up patriarchal authority. Prior to moving to South Carolina, Miller taught at the University of Alabama from 1978 until 1994, and at the University of Kentucky from 1994 until 2004. After growing up in San Diego, California, he was educated at Yale University and the University of California, Irvine. He has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, David Lee 1951 births Living people American academics of English literature