“You Will Be Missed You Know, but This Is No Place for You to Grow”: A Critical Metaphor Study of Pre-Adoption Narratives

Abstract

This article discusses (pre-)adoption narratives by investigating a selection of children’s picture books featuring multi-ethnic families. The research examines both textual and pictorial resources, focusing specifically on the use of metaphors as a tool of cognition which may help an audience of young readers understand and become acquainted with unfamiliar notions connected to the process of interracial adoption. Attention is also devoted to the identification, interpretation, and explanation of recurring metaphors in the books as a means of framing (pre-)adoption experiences, i.e. foregrounding certain aspects of the target domains and backgrounding others. The analysis has revealed an almost ubiquitous presence of the journey metaphor in the sample of books.