Making Home : Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels

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, and 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 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.