Victorian Childhood and Children: A Conversation with Claudia Nelson

Abstract

abstract:This interview focuses on the question of what adoption studies can bring to childhood studies. Nelson points out that adoption studies, which concern not only adopted children and relinquishing mothers but also adult adoptees and birth mothers late in life, can help to inform investigations of temporality, and perhaps particularly queer temporality. Invoking novels from Frankenstein to Bleak House to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, this conversation notes that both adoption scholars and scholars of family and age studies must recognize that an adult is not only an adult but also a former child, that adulthood itself is not unitary but a matter of multiple stages and shifting relationships, and that the literature of adoption often overturns “conventional” paradigms of family in multiple ways.