Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Imagining Adoption / Marianne Navy -- Adoption and the "Improvement of the Estate" in Trollope and Craik / Tess O'Toole -- Adoption in 'Silas Marner' and 'Daniel Deronda' / Marianne Navy -- Outlaws, Outcasts, and Orphans: The Historical Imagination and 'Anne of Green Gables' / Beverly Crockett -- Redefining "Real" Motherhood: Representations of Adoptive Mothers, 1900-1950 / Julie Berebitsky -- From Charlotte to the Outposts of Empire: Troping Adoption / Beverly Lyon Clark -- The Immaculate Deception: Adoption in Albee's Plays / Garry Leonard -- "I Am Your Mother -- She Was a Carrying Case" : Adoption, Class, and Sexual Orientation in Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit' / Margot Gayle Backus -- A Junction of Amends: Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Adoption / Jan VanStavern -- Adoption, Identity, and Voice: Jackie Kay's Inventions of Self / Nancy K. Gish -- Genealogy Revised in 'Secrets and Lies' / Paris De Soto -- Natural Bonds, Legal Boundaries: Modes of Persuasion in Adoption Rhetoric / Judith Modell -- "File It under 'L' for Love Child" : Adoptive Policies and Practices in the Erdrich Tetralogy / Jill R. Deans -- Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolver's 'Pigs in Heaven' and Margaret Laurence's 'The Diviners' / Kristina Fagan -- Should Whites Adopt African American Children? : One Family's Phenomenological Response / Martha Satz -- Incorporating the Transnational Adoptee / Claudia Castaneda -- Select Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.