Dr Meredith Miller
Lecturer
School of English, Communication and Philosophy
- Welsh speaking
- Available for postgraduate supervision
Overview
I am a fiction writer and literary critic with an interest in gender, sexuality and narrative form. As a cultural materialist I am interested in the relationship between gendersex, reading communities and evolving forms of fiction, and between narrative form and the evolution of publishing contexts.
As a fiction writer I am concerned with interactions among sexuality, narrative form and feminine reading communities. I also have a creative interest in aurality and the relation between language, landscape and the experience of location. In 2022, I was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies short story prize. My two published novels with Harper are: Little Wrecks (2017) and How We Learned to Lie (2018).
I am currently leading a group of Humanities researchers from around the UK on a project entitled Twentieth Century Culture and the Reproductive Body. My monograph Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction: Modernity, Will and Desire 1870-1910 was published by Palgrave in 2013. I am the editor of two forthcoming volumes of work on women writing and publishing in the period between 1900-1920, for Taylor & Francis and Bloomsbury Academic.
You can read some of my thoughts about writing on my blog.
Publication
2022
- Miller, M. 2022. Close in time, space or order. In: Canning, E. ed. Cree: The Rhys Davies Short Story Prize Anthology. Cardigan: Parthian Books, pp. 105-118.
2021
- Miller, M. 2021. Edgeworth, Owenson, and the masculine border. Women's Writing 28(2), pp. 192-211. (10.1080/09699082.2021.1879443)
2019
- Miller, M. 2019. Lesbian, gay and trans Bildungsromane. In: Graham, S. ed. A History of the Bildungsroman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 239-266.
2018
- Miller, M. 2018. How we learned to lie. HarperCollins.
- Miller, M. 2018. Tuberculosis and visionary sensibility: The consumptive body as masculine dissent in George Eliot and Henry James. In: Parsons, J. E. and Heholt, R. eds. The Victorian Male Body. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 108-127.
2017
- Miller, M. 2017. Mystical nationalism and the rotten heart of empire: The tangled trope of marriage in Daniel Deronda. In: Lambert, C. and Shaw, M. eds. For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women. Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 83-100.
- Miller, M. 2017. Little wrecks. HarperCollins.
2014
- Miller, M. 2014. Ice. Stand 12(1), pp. 35-38.
2013
- Miller, M. 2013. Feminine subjects in masculine fiction: modernity, will and desire, 1870-1910. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2011
- Miller, M. 2011. The window's wife. Prole 6, pp. 19-32.
2009
- Miller, M. 2009. 'I don't want to be a [white] girl': Gender, race and resistance in the Southern Gothic. In: Wallace, D. and Smith, A. eds. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133-151.
2007
- Miller, M. 2007. Introduction - Teaching in the gaps: Authority, ideology and identity. Feminist Teacher 18(1), pp. 1-8.
2006
- Miller, M. 2006. The Feminine Mystique: Sexual excess and the pre-political housewife. Women: A Cultural Review 16(1), pp. 1-17. (10.1080/09574040500045573)
2001
- Miller, M. 2001. Secret agents and public victims: The implied lesbian reader. Journal of Popular Culture 35(1), pp. 37-58. (10.1111/j.0022-3840.2001.3501_37.x)
Adrannau llyfrau
- Miller, M. 2022. Close in time, space or order. In: Canning, E. ed. Cree: The Rhys Davies Short Story Prize Anthology. Cardigan: Parthian Books, pp. 105-118.
- Miller, M. 2019. Lesbian, gay and trans Bildungsromane. In: Graham, S. ed. A History of the Bildungsroman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 239-266.
- Miller, M. 2018. Tuberculosis and visionary sensibility: The consumptive body as masculine dissent in George Eliot and Henry James. In: Parsons, J. E. and Heholt, R. eds. The Victorian Male Body. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 108-127.
- Miller, M. 2017. Mystical nationalism and the rotten heart of empire: The tangled trope of marriage in Daniel Deronda. In: Lambert, C. and Shaw, M. eds. For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women. Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 83-100.
- Miller, M. 2009. 'I don't want to be a [white] girl': Gender, race and resistance in the Southern Gothic. In: Wallace, D. and Smith, A. eds. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133-151.
Erthyglau
- Miller, M. 2021. Edgeworth, Owenson, and the masculine border. Women's Writing 28(2), pp. 192-211. (10.1080/09699082.2021.1879443)
- Miller, M. 2014. Ice. Stand 12(1), pp. 35-38.
- Miller, M. 2011. The window's wife. Prole 6, pp. 19-32.
- Miller, M. 2007. Introduction - Teaching in the gaps: Authority, ideology and identity. Feminist Teacher 18(1), pp. 1-8.
- Miller, M. 2006. The Feminine Mystique: Sexual excess and the pre-political housewife. Women: A Cultural Review 16(1), pp. 1-17. (10.1080/09574040500045573)
- Miller, M. 2001. Secret agents and public victims: The implied lesbian reader. Journal of Popular Culture 35(1), pp. 37-58. (10.1111/j.0022-3840.2001.3501_37.x)
Llyfrau
- Miller, M. 2018. How we learned to lie. HarperCollins.
- Miller, M. 2017. Little wrecks. HarperCollins.
- Miller, M. 2013. Feminine subjects in masculine fiction: modernity, will and desire, 1870-1910. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Research
My pre-occupation with the material context of fiction in perdiocals continues with in my current work on aesthetics, generic divides and abortion in 1920s Britain. I am the lead for the UK-wide research network Culture and the Reproductive Body, working with colleagues from eleven institutions around the country. We have recently completed an AHRC networking proposal and will be organising a conference titled Twentieth Century Culture and the reproductive body at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Autumn 2023.
I am currently working on two projects which began from a single sheet of regional newspaper from 1923. An advertisement for abortifacient implements and remedies found there has led to both a critical monograph and a novel. The critical monograph, Abortion and Aesthetics in 1920s Britain, follows on from Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction (Palgrave, 2013) in a further exploration of the manner in which literature enacts its generic distinctions against the bodily experience of semi-distant female subjects. The novel, currently titled Rock Paper Sister, is set greater Birmingham in the 1920s and centres on three cousins who have inherited family wealth generated from a business which manufactures and distributes abortifacient remedies and surgical implements.
Biography
I was born and raised in the United States, where I completed my first two degrees. My Bachelor’s, from the University of New Orleans, was a modular degree focussed on World Literature and Women’s Studies. The interdisciplinary approach of the Women’s Studies programme at UNO introduced me to critical and methodological approaches from a broad range of Humanities and Social Science disciplines which continue to inform my academic work. The passionate and socially active scholars who taught me there are a continued source of inspiration.
I completed a Master’s in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York in 1996. My MA pathway concentrated on Medieval Literature and Critical Theory, in particular theories of gender, sexuality and identity. Following the MA, I came to the UK to undertake my PhD at University of Sussex. The PhD focussed on the relation between subculture and mass culture in lesbian reading communities formed around pulp fiction in the postwar United States. Some articles derived from that work can be seen here and here.
My PhD work made it clear to me that my preferred methodology for thinking about literature would always include the material and social context within which it was produced and received. My work continues to focus on the novel as a machine for harnessing gendered desires, on the role of women, gender and sexuality in the development of the novel and on the way in which queer communities have deployed its generic forms.
Though I have always been an imaginative as well as an academic writer, my creative work and my teaching have coincided only since 2014, when I began increasingly to teach and supervise Creative Writing. My novels and short fiction are informed by the same concerns as my academic work, and I am particularly interested in addressing feminine readerships. The experience of publishing big market novels has added new layers to my understanding of the context in which novels are made and how reading communities are formed around particular markets and genres. You can read the first three chapters of my novel Little Wrecks here.
Supervisions
I am interested in supervising PhD students in:
- gender and fictions of the long nineteenth-century
- theories of gender and sexuality, particularly as they relate to narrative form
- the fin de siecle and the advent of modernism
- creative writing: fiction
- questions around the literary and the popular