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Dr.
Carol J. Singley This pilot study is partially funded by the Center for Children and Childhood Studies The
Presentation of Adoption in American Literature This project is about American adoption narratives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. This project is the first to situate adoption narratives in cultural and social history, and the first to analyze adoption in relation to American themes and changing intellectual, religious, and scientific thought. Stories, in particular, reveal authors' and readers' attitudes toward adoption and demonstrate how adoption was or might be practiced in a given period and among various groups of people. Specifically, this project accomplishes three goals. 1) It establishes a discourse of adoption, explaining how the disruption of genealogy and formation of new family ties radically shapes the identity of the child, birthparents, and adoptive parents. It illuminates complex practices and attitudes as they change in response to social, economic, and religious forces. Adoption - represented in literature as both "second best" and as ennobling or salvational - inscribes our most tenaciously and ambiguously held beliefs about lineage, children's best welfare, and the effects of nature and nurture. 2) It defines a narrative poetics of adoption. 3) It suggests a distinct quality of American adoption, derived from the nation's emphasis on individual rights and "fresh starts." The US led western nations by passing the first adoption legislation to protect the welfare of the child, and American history is often described in terms of a child's development. Adoption serves as a trope for the American story, for the tale of a nation that broke away from its birth parent, England, and created a new identity for itself in an adopted land. For more information, please contact
Carol Singley, Department
of English, Rutgers University-Camden. Back to Center
for Children and Childhood Studies' research page |