ABSTRACT
Adoption, a widely acknowledged, routinely practiced way to form families, appears in Western cultural mythologies and privileged literary texts dating from the biblical story of Moses and the Greek tragedy Oedipus. Yet adoption is often missing in literary discourse about constructions of American individual, family, and national identity. Adoption practices, as well as the religious, economic, political, and psychological forces that shape them, provide a window through which the authors view a wide American literary and cultural landscape. After establishing a theoretical foundation for linking adoption and American literary experience. A study of American adoption literature might also include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Although he was not adopted, Franklin’s writings reflect a struggle between adoptive and genealogical impulses as he reconciles loyalties toward England with growing commitments to American independence.
