Imagining Adoption looks at representations of adoption in an array of literary genres by diverse authors including George Eliot, Edward Albee, and Barbara Kingsolver as well as ordinary adoptive mothers and adoptee activists, exploring what these writings share and what they debate. Marianne Novy is Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

"A timely and fascinating collection, Imagining Adoption holds a mirror up to the back of our social and mythic fabric, showing the warp of family romance shot through with a blood-red woof of adoption."
---Alison Booth, University of Virginia

"A book on adoption that resonates with the contradictions, love loss, power, symbolism, fantasy, pain, and joy that is adoption! This book is a treasure."
---Barbara Katz Rothman, Baruch College

"As the face of adoption is undergoing radical change both nationally and internationally, we can only be thankful for a volume like Imagining Adoption . Turning to literature, memoir, and film, [these essays] illuminate the psychological and ideological issues surrounding adoption in subtle and complex readings. Imagining Adoption adds a new chapter to the narrative and the fantasy that constitutes family today."
---Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College

"A path-breaking anthology. I salute its intellectual bravery and its lucid framing of a vital topic of social and literary practice."
---Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University

"Well-informed essays about social and theoretical constructs determining who belongs to whom for which reasons and at which price(s), including forthright discussions of the essential subjects of motherhood and the 'natural'... Comprehensive and complex, this is an anthology certain to find wide readership."
---Choice, February 2002

* Choice *

"A remarkable anthology of scholarly views of adoption in literature---this book is a gem"
---Origins

* Origins *

". . . a gem that any thinking person interested in adoption would enjoy. . . . [T]he best thing I have read on the subject in ages."
---Mary Anne Cohen, Origins, Spring 2002

* Origins *

"It will be welcome to anyone curious about or engaged in the dense and apparently already particularized study of adoption as a literary theme, cultural metaphor, and social practice."
---J. M. Baker, Jr., University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Fall 2002

* Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *

"If we are effectively to teach the literature of adoption, we must be able to help our students negotiate the social questions presented by the discursive and material practices that have defined this institution to date. Teachers and readers who want to engage in this enterprise will be particularly grateful to Novy's comprehensive introduction."
---Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy

* Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy *



Book Information
ISBN 9780472030026
Author Marianne Novy
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint The University of Michigan Press
Publisher The University of Michigan Press