Includes bibliographical references (p. [249]-256) and index.

Machine generated contents note: PART ONE: HAZARDS OF BIRTH -- 1. Cradle and All -- Mythopoeic Mothers and Tropes of Generation -- Weathering Birth -- 2. Aggressive Movements in Psychoanalysis: Klein, -- Winnicott, and Irigaray -- Conserving Winnicott -- Theoretical Responses to Catastrophe -- Range of Motion -- PART Two: GENERATIONS OF BLAZONS -- 3. The Providence of Similitude in the Song of Songs -- Mothering and the Song's Creatural Object World -- Metonymy and Winnicottian Aggression -- 4. The Scandal of Similitude: The Song of Songs in Spenser's -- Wedding Volume -- The Problem of "as": Blazon and Simile -- Nostalgia in the Beloved's Absence -- PART THREE: GRATITUDE, ENVY, SONG -- 5. rom Aggression to Gratitude: Air and Song in the -- Parlement of Foules -- Sallying Forth: The Peripatetic Dreamer -- Dame Nature and the Maternal Sponsorship of Sound -- 9 Invisible in Good-Enough Company: The Dreamer in Nature's Household -- 6. Feasting on Language: Love's Labor's Lost and the Debt -- to the Maternal -- Does Kleinian Gratitude Pay the Irigarayan Debt to the Mother? -- Lyric Catalogues -- PART FOUR: DEATH IS THE MOTHER -- 7. Distinctions of Birth: Hunger for Immortality in -- Lucretius's De Rerum Natura -- Floribund Ascetic: The Philosophical Speaker -- From Milky Matters to Ruinous Waste: The Sequence of Mothers -- Destruction, Creation, and the Fixed Mother -- 8. Absorption into the Chthonic Mother: Spenser's -- Faerie Queene, Book 4 -- What a Tangle -- Mothers to Think Back Through -- No End to Possibility -- 9. Enough: The Winter's Tale -- Bibliographic Essay: Debts of Thinking -- Index.