Abstract
As the example of Oedipus demonstrates, adoption has a centuries-long presence in the Western imagination. Te dynamics and mysteries of kinship propel many imaginative texts, and adoption offers a singular entry into that familial complexity. Taking the word in a loose rather than a legal sense—that is to say, describing any situation in which children are separated from birth parents and grow up in alternative homes—British writing provides a large number of relevant texts, including Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Pericles, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, several of Dickens’s novels, among them Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield, and George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, and Felix Holt.1
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Notes
For perceptive readings of many of these texts, and others, see Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family and Diference in Fiction and Drama (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005). The book includes a useful chapter on the Oedipus legend, mainly positioned in support of open adoption. Novy has also edited a volume called Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), which includes commentaries on both English and American writers.
Carol J. Singley, Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 83.
William St. Clair, “But What Did We Actually Read?” Times Literary Supplement (May 12, 2006), pp. 13–15.
Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman (New York: Ecco, 2012), pp. 79, 233.
P. D. James, Innocent Blood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 14.
Ellen Ullman, By Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 167, 348.
Elie Wiesel, The Sonderberg Case, trans. Catherine Themerson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 165.
Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 243.
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), p. 1.
Elinor Lipman, Then She Found Me (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), p. 1.
A. M. Homes, The Mistress’s Daughter (New York: Viking, 2007), p. 7.
Jeannette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), pp. 1, 223.
Nancy Newton Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (Verrier Publications, 1993).
Jeremy Harding, Mother Country: Memoir of an Adopted Boy (New York: Verso, 2010 [2006]), p. vii.
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© 2013 Peter Conn
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Conn, P. (2013). Imagining Adoption. In: Adoption: A Brief Social and Cultural History. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333919_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333919_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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