The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader presents a central source of scholarly approaches arranged around fundamental questions about how adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, is represented in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities. Divided into three major sections, this volume traces the history of adoption and its analogues, identifies major movements in the practice, and illuminates comprehensive disciplinary frameworks that underpin the field’s approaches. This key scholarly and pedagogical tool includes excerpts from scholars such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Homans, Margaret D. Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves, exploring a variety of representations of adoption and embracing interdisciplinary discussions of reproduction as it intersects race, ethnicity, power-relations, the concept of nation, history, the idea of childhood, and many other contemporary concerns. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader provides a single-volume resource for instructors or students who want a convenient collection of foundational materials for teaching or reference and for researchers newly discovering the field. This volume’s humanities perspective makes it the first of its kind to collect secondary materials in Critical Adoption Studies for researchers, who, in taking up cultural representations of adoption, examine cultural contexts not for their impact on the practice over time but for their richness of engagement with the human experience of belonging, kinship, and identity.

The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader presents a central source of scholarly approaches arranged around fundamental questions about how adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, is represented in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities. Divided into three major sections, this volume traces the history of adoption and its analogues, identifies major movements in the practice, and illuminates comprehensive disciplinary frameworks that underpin the field’s approaches. This key scholarly and pedagogical tool includes excerpts from scholars such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Homans, Margaret D. Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves, exploring a variety of representations of adoption and embracing interdisciplinary discussions of reproduction as it intersects race, ethnicity, power-relations, the concept of nation, history, the idea of childhood, and many other contemporary concerns. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader provides a single-volume resource for instructors or students who want a convenient collection of foundational materials for teaching or reference and for researchers newly discovering the field. This volume’s humanities perspective makes it the first of its kind to collect secondary materials in Critical Adoption Studies for researchers, who, in taking up cultural representations of adoption, examine cultural contexts not for their impact on the practice over time but for their richness of engagement with the human experience of belonging, kinship, and identity.

The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing. Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections-Foundations, Transformations, and Futures-each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.

The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing. Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections-Foundations, Transformations, and Futures-each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.

This is the first collection of critical essays on the works of Dominican American author Julia Alvarez. A prolific writer of nearly two dozen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children s literature, Alvarez has garnered numerous international accolades, including the impressive F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. She was one of only ten poets invited to write for President Obama s inauguration in 2009, and her "In the Time of the Butterflies" was selected as a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, putting her in the company of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harper Lee. Yet, despite Alvarez s commercial success and flourishing critical reputation, much of the published scholarship has focused on her two best-known novels "In the Time of the Butterflies" and "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents."
Moving beyond Alvarez s more recognizable work, the contributors here approach her wider canon from different points of access and with diverging critical tools. This enriches current discussions on the construction of selves in life writing, and nonfiction more generally, and furthers our understanding of these selves as particular kinds of participants in the creation of nation and place. In addition, this book provides fresh insight for transnational feminist studies and makes a meaningful contribution to the broader study of the gendered diaspora, as it positions Alvarez scholarship in a global context."