Making home : orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels / Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, Helena Wahlström.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holmgren Troy, Maria.

Contributor:

Kella, Elizabeth.

Wahlström, Helena.

Series:

Contemporary American and Canadian writers

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Orphans in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 254 pages ; 22 cm.

Other Title:

Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the 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, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison among others. It 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, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national, and literary home. By analysing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and racial 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 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Orphans and American literature: texts, intertexts, and contexts 10

2 From captivity to kinship: Native American orphans and sovereignty 40

3 Literary kinships: Euro-American orphans, gender, genre, and cultural memory 83

4 Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, and kinship building 126

5 At home in the world? Orphans learn and remember in African American novels 169.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [225]-249) and index.

ISBN:

9780719089596

071908959X

OCLC:

883512433