Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and DramaUniversity of Michigan Press, 2005 - 292 páginas Reading Adoption explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals 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 scrutinizes basic themes that repeat throughout, such as the difference between adoptive parents and children, the mirroring between adoptees and their birth parents, and the romanticization of the theme of lost family and recovered identity. Engagingly written from Novy's dual perspectives as critic and adult adoptee, the book artfully combines the techniques of literary and feminist scholarship with memoir, and in doing so it sheds new light on familiar texts. Marianne Novy is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. |
Índice
One Reading from an Adopted Position I | 1 |
The Shamed SearcherHero and | 37 |
Five Choices of Parentage Identity and Nation | 121 |
Direitos de autor | |
7 outras secções não apresentadas
Outras edições - Ver tudo
Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama Marianne Novy Pré-visualização limitada - 2005 |
Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama Marianne Novy Visualização de excertos - 2007 |
Palavras e frases frequentes
adoptive mother adoptive parents American appears associated baby beginning belief biological birth mother birth parents blood born calls chapter characters Cherokee child choice close connection consider contrast critics culture Daniel daughter dead deal death discussed early Eliot emphasizes Esther ethnicity example experience father feel foster genetic George girl gives hand heredity idea identifies identity imagine important influence interest involved issue Jane Jewish Jocasta kind kinship later less letter literature lives look married means meeting Michigan nature never novel nurture Oedipus parenthood perhaps person play plot possible present question raised readers references relation relationship says seems sense Shakespeare shows Silas similar social story suggests Taylor tell thought tion tradition Turtle University Press woman women writing York