Reading Adoption
Subtitle: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: September 23, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780472115075
Subjects: Family & relationships; Literary studies: general; Oedipus (Greek mythology) in l; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; American literature; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Literary Criticism; British Isles; General; American - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; Books & Reading; Adoption in literature; English literature; History and criticism; Adoption
Description: "Reading Adoption explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing how these literary representations shape cultural expectations of adoption and reunion. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee, and others, Marianne Novy suggests how fiction has contributed to general perceptions of adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. She observes how these works address the question of what makes a parent, as she identifies repeated themes such as differences between adoptive parents and children, fantasies of mirroring between adoptees and birth parents, and the relationship between nature and nurture.

She meditates on how her relationships with her adoptive parents, her birth mother, and her own daughter affect her reading, and ultimately finds issues in much adoption literature relevant to parenting in any kind of family. Written from Novy's dual perspectives as critic and adult adoptee, the book combines the techniques of literary and feminist scholarship with memoir, and in doing so it sheds new light on familiar texts."--BOOK JACKET.