Literature and Adoption: Themes, Theses, Questions

Abstract

Natty Bumppo, Topsy, Ishmael, Huck, Elena Olenska, Joe Christmas, Lolita, Beloved: American literature is famously full of orphans, foundlings, and changelings—many of whom find themselves adopted into new families. Social scientists have been studying adoptive families closely since at least the 1970s, when rates of formal adoption began to drop off precipitously in the US and the feminist revolution triggered key changes in family structure. Outstanding work by historians Barbara Melosh (Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption [2002]), Timothy Hacsi (Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America [1997]), Julie Miller (Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City [2008), and Laura Briggs (Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption [2012]), for example, has revealed the mechanisms by which American norms about kinship were implemented and policed through adoption policy and orphan care; their work also documents the means by which new forms of familial and national affiliation developed. In the last decade, literary critics have begun join this important conversation.