Adoption and Orphan Tropes in Literary Studies By Lori Askeland Introduction In 1997, when I completed my dissertation on “Dependent Children in American Fiction and Culture, 1850–1860,” the academic discipline of adoption studies had yet to be born from a confluence of cultural studies, women’s studies, and children’s studies, which had all arisen as new disciplines in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Of course, literary scholars had long explored the orphan as an old and powerful trope in a variety of Western and Anglo-American literary traditions, as in key critical texts by such stalwarts as Northrop Frye, R. W. B. Lewis, and Edward Said, and more recent works by Marc Shell, all included below. Moreover I suspect that even staunchly anti-univeralist cultural critics today would still agree that stories of orphaning, abduction, and adoption form part of virtually every human cultural tradition, from preColumbian indigenous narratives and cultural practices (see Askeland, ed., Rifkin, and Jerng) to the rise of the immensely popular orphan, Harry Potter—whose experiences of “Muggle” kinship care were likewise first shared with the world in 1997. Yet by that year there had been little work in the humanities, generally, on the ongoing conversation between these often widely circulated “orphan stories” and the public policy decisions and socioeconomic forces in the Anglophone world that have either resulted in or responded to the orphaning of children— or both. The metaphor of the orphan, in other words, has often been severed in literary criticism from serious attention to the lived reality of child abandonment or abduction, adoption and foster care—and that reality has been mostly invisible to traditional literary scholars as narrative elements. For example, while the Oedipal story stands at the heart of the Western literary tradition and cultural criticism, its status specifically as a story of fostering and adoption had been overlooked in mainstream literary studies. Marianne Novy’s writings (2001, 2005) engage this question seriously, as do Margaret Homans’ (2006, 2013). They draw our attention to even earlier work on the Oedipal narrative in the memoirs by adoptee activists Jean Paton and Betty Jean Lifton. Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 14 The turn of the millennium has thus brought a flood of new scholarship, often (but not always) by scholars like Novy whose lives have been shaped in some significant way by adoption. I used a very broad definition of “literary studies” in creating the following list—meaning scholarly analyses that seek to understand and explain the significance of original writings or stories in any genre or medium. But, as is clear from a perusal of the special “adoption” issues of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (2002) and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2003), many of these works have been specifically rooted in life writing—as a focus of study or through the incorporation of personal memoir by academics who are also members of the “adoption triad”—whether as adult adoptees, adoptive parents, or (least frequently) as parents who surrendered children for adoption. Importantly, works by Homans, Park Nelson, and Eng remind us that adoption stories often narrate real experiences of grief and/or trauma— but the traumas are typically not the same as we move from one position in the triad to another. Moreover, the dominant narrative of adoption in the West is a celebratory story of rescue—a “win-win” for adoptive parents and adoptees—but one where birth parents are often entirely erased and adoptees are required to be grateful (see especially Park Nelson). Literary scholars focused on adoption have quickly become aware that their positions in that triad, or lack thereof, inevitably affect their own views of adoption as a cultural institution and as an intimate relation, particularly if that position is unexamined. Thus many of the works below include some critical disclosures and interrogations, reminding us once again of the many ways that these often personal narratives can be political. In fact, particularly in the case of transnational adoption, the “personal” decisions about adoption can directly engage all the hard questions of globalization and, in some cases, evoke horrific histories of colonization, imperialism, genocide, slavery, and human trafficking, despite the mostly positive...