Making home: Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels
Making home: Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels
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Abstract
Making Home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in times of perceived national crisis concerns about American identity, family, and literary history are articulated around this literary figure. The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Toni Morrison. It also investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel, and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making Home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, multiculturalism, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national, and literary home. By analyzing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.
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Front Matter
- Introduction
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1
Orphans and American literature: texts, intertexts, and contexts
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2
From captivity to kinship: Native American orphans and sovereignty
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3
Literary kinships: Euro-American orphans, gender, genre, and cultural memory
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4
Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, and kinship building
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5
At home in the world? Orphans learn and remember in African American novels
- Coda
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End Matter
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