Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and CultureMarianne Novy University of Michigan Press, 2004 - 316 pages "Adoption has long been a pervasive theme in literature, from folk legends to the novels of Barbara Kingsolver. Many nonliterary writers have been increasingly drawn to the subject. Imagining Adoption brings together for the first time analyses of literary portrayals of adoption and other examples of adoption discourse. The essays analyze adoption in a range of works, including the novels of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; children's literature (Anne of Green Gables, Charlotte's Web); contemporary fiction (Louise Erdrich, Jeanette Winterson, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Laurence); and poetry (Sandra McPherson, Jackie Kay) and film (Secrets and Lies, Losing Isaiah). They examine personal narratives by "home children;" magazine articles by adoptive mothers; adoptee rights newsletters; and scholarly arguments about transracial and transnational adoption. The contributors contextualize their literary and rhetorical analyses with reference to historical research; feminist, Foucauldian, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theory; and personal experience. Adoption plots dramatize cultural tensions about definitions of family and the importance of heredity, along with changing constructions of illegitimacy, infertility, maternal instinct, and homosexuality. Since adoption often brings together people from groups separated by economics, ethnicity, and increasingly by nation of birth, its use in fiction can contrast their worlds, and can protest against their split and/or against the victimization of one group by the other. Some contributors argue that adoption affects the imagination of several adoptee authors (Albee, Winterson, McPherson, Kay) even when dealing with other topics. But most importantly this anthology shows how complex and varied are the ways in which people have written about adoption itself."--[Résumé de l'éditeur]. |
Contents
Imagining Adoption | 1 |
Adoption and the Improvement of the Estate in Trollope and Craik | 17 |
Adoption in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda | 35 |
The Historical Imagination and Anne of Green Gables | 57 |
Representations of Adoptive Mothers 19001950 | 83 |
Troping Adoption | 97 |
Adoption in Albees Plays | 111 |
Adoption Class and Sexual Orientation in Jeanette Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit | 133 |
Genealogy Revised in Secrets and Lies | 193 |
Modes of Persuasion in Adoption Rhetoric | 207 |
Adoptive Policies and Practices in the Erdrich Tetralogy | 231 |
Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolvers Pigs in Heaven and Margaret Laurences The Diviners | 251 |
One Familys Phenomenological Response | 267 |
Incorporating the Transnational Adoptee | 277 |
301 | |
Contributors | 305 |
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Common terms and phrases
adop adopted child adoptee adoptee's Adoption Papers adoption plots adoptive family adoptive mother adoptive parents adult Albee argues ASG Newsletter baby Bartholet bastard Beet Queen biological birth mother birth parents blood bond Canadian Charlotte's Web children's literature cultural Cynthia Daniel Daniel Deronda daughter Deronda Doctor Thorne Eppie Erdrich essay experience fantasy father feel fiction foster George Eliot girl Green Gables Gresham Hortense Hortense's Ibid identity illegitimacy illegitimate imagined Jackie Kay Jeanette Jeanette's mother Jerry Karen kinship literature lives Louise Erdrich Marilla Mary maternal McPherson metaphor Morag motherhood narrative Native nature novel orphans person Pigs in Heaven poem race racial records relationship reproduction rhetoric Sandra McPherson says Scottish sense sexual Silas Silas Marner social story suggests Tiny Alice tion transnational adoption transracial adoption University Press voice wanted Winterson's woman women writing York