Table Of ContentAT
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Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in iOM
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contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the times of crp
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By analysing how contemporary novels both E
incorporate and resist gendered and racial literary
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers
conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and Maria Holmgren Troy is Professor
of English at Karlstad University
factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore
Elizabeth Kella is Senior Lecturer MARIA HOLMGREN TROY,
kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, CAC
in English at Södertörn University amo
this book offers something distinctly new in American Helena Wahlström is Senior Lecturer in naent ELIZABETH KELLA, AND HELENA WAHLSTRÖM
lsictehroalaryrs s itnutdeireess. tIet dis i na tchreu cliianlk sst buedtyw feoer ns tluitdeernattsu raen adn d GCoevnedre irm Satugdei:e iss taotc Ukpphpostaol.ac oUmniversity diaricaem
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identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national W aor MAKING
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HOME
Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk in contemporary American novels
Making home
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers
Series editors
Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith
Also available
Thomas Pynchon Simon Malpas And Andrew Taylor
Jonathan Lethem James Peacock
Mark Z. Danielewski Edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons
Louise Erdrich David Stirrup
Passing into the present: contemporary American fiction of
racial and gender passing Sinéad Moynihan
Paul Auster Mark Brown
Douglas Coupland Andrew Tate
Philip Roth David Brauner
Making home
Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural
memory in contemporary American
novels
Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and
Helena Wahlström
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, Helena Wahlström 2014
The rights of Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström
to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed in the United States exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
Distributed in Canada exclusively by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 07190 8959 6 hardback
First published 2014
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and
does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Typeset
by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services,
Brinscall, Lancs
Contents
Series editors’ foreword page vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Orphans and American literature: texts, intertexts, and 10
contexts
2 From captivity to kinship: Native American orphans 40
and sovereignty
3 Literary kinships: Euro-American orphans, gender, genre, 83
and cultural memory
4 Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, 126
and kinship building
5 At home in the world? Orphans learn and remember in 169
African American novels
Coda 214
Bibliography 225
Index 250
Series editors’ foreword
This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing
over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of estab-
lished, emerging and critically neglected writers – mixing the canon-
ical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and
analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus
on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both
the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increas-
ing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on
programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the
world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue
a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and
that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory
of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and
interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in
which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the
North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context.
Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role
in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnational-
ism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing
with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the
drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are mem-
bers of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider
themselves on the nation’s margins as well as those who chronicle
middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate
and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is
not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that
literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North
American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions.
viii Series editors’ foreword
The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context in-
volves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and
theoretical, and that contemporary fiction defies easy categorization.
For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which
they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic goal is
to subvert the idea of genre altogether. The challenge of defining the
roles of writers and assessing their reception by reading communities
is central to the aims of the series.
Overall, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers aims to be-
gin to represent something of the diversity of contemporary writing
and seeks to engage students and scholars in stimulating debates
about the contemporary and about fiction.
Nahem Yousaf
Sharon Monteith
Acknowledgments
Making Home is a collaborative and co-written study by three scholars
who have worked closely together with the book from its inception to
its completion. We have brought to this work a shared background in
American literary studies, our specializations within this field, and
our knowledge of other areas such as gender studies and memory
studies. In our exploration of orphanhood and kinship, we have been
able to draw upon insights accrued during Elizabeth Kella’s previous
work on representations of ethnic communities in American fiction;
Maria Holmgren Troy’s earlier research on American domesticity, as
well as her work on memory, trauma, and genre; and Helena Wahl-
ström’s research on representations of American families, particular-
ly fatherhood and masculinity. Collaboration and collective writing of
chapters have broadened and deepened our study. More than the sum
of its parts, the dynamic of the project has taken us into new terri-
tories in terms of the writing process and enabled us to ask new, or
at least different, questions about literary American orphans making
home.
Time to write, together as well as apart, is absolutely essential in or-
der to carry through a book project such as Making Home. A generous
three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council has provided re-
search time and, at times, opportunities for the three of us to work to-
gether in the same location despite our geographically dispersed aca-
demic homes. We are grateful to Helge Ax:son Johnson’s Foundation
for giving Liz Kella and Helena Wahlström a travel grant to the British
Library, where they worked together for two weeks in 2008. We also
spent two weeks together in the British Library in 2009 thanks to a
grant from the Magnus Bergvall Foundation. Maria Holmgren Troy
would like to express her gratitude to the School of English, Film,
