Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-282) and index.
Reading from an Adopted Position -- Oedipus: The Shamed Searcher-Hero and the Definition of Parenthood -- Adoption and Shakespearean Families: Nature, Nurture, and Resemblance -- Adoption in the Developing British Novel: Stigma, Social Protest, and Gender -- Choices of Parenthood, Identity, and Nation in George Eliot's Adoption Novels -- Commodified Adoption, the Search Movement, and the Adoption Triangle in American Drama since Albee -- Nurture, Loss, and Cherokee Identity in Barbara Kingsolver's Novels of Cross-Cultural Adoption.
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"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."--Jacket.