Rereading Orphanhood

Dr Diane Warren is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions, (Ashgate, 2008). Professor Laura Peters is based at University of Roehampton. She is a well-published author including Dickens and Race (MUP, 2013) and Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (MUP, 2000).

• AcknowledgmentsList of ContributorsIntroduction, Laura Peters1. The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s "Best Interests" in Mansfield Park and Mrs. Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case, Cheryl L. Nixon2. Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775-1825), Kevin Binfield3. ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel, Tamara Wagner4. Adoptive Reading, Kelly Hager5. The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption, Harriet Salisbury6. Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens, Joey Kingsley7. The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture, Laura Peters8. Getting the Father Back: The Orphan’s Oath in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Blackmore’s Erema, Peter Merchant9. Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature, Jane Suzanne Carroll10. ‘The Accumulated and the Single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity, Diane Warren11. Something worse than the past in not being yet over: Elizabeth Bowen’s Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity, Ann Rea12. Orphans, Money, and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman, Claudia NelsonCoda, Diane Warren

Rereading Orphanhood makes a useful contribution to ongoing scholarly and popular debates regarding the family, identity, kinship, connection and inheritance, often engaging with such questions through the diverse perspectives that the orphan figure seems naturally to invite: postcolonialism, gender studies, critical race studies and children’s literary studies.