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.

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.

Miller's study is extremely satisfying to read, and his points are well-made and viable. He presents supporting evidence for his thesis in a logical and measured fashion, and proves himself capable of textual analysis of sources ranging widely across temporal and cultural boundaries.

In this fine book, Miller traces an ensemble of motifs, particularly the boy/old man and the father's witness, across Western culture from its emergence in the 'aqedah' (the binding of Isaac) through Virgil and Shakespeare to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.... Miller writes lucid prose and illuminates a cultural narrative that will appeal to students of literature, philosophy, anthropology, religion, and gender. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Miller's book functions as an imaginative structure and does so quite beautifully.