This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial “writing back” to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via their engagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these texts shaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. This study thus complicates the “rise of the novel” framework and British middle-class identity formation from a transnational perspective combining approaches in narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.

Jean Ross Justice’s Family Feeling, a novella and collection of stories, is a moving portrait of American domestic life of the last half-century. Often spanning generations, the stories are defined by subtle shifts in both family relationships and the ways in which we reconfigure them in memory and mind. Many of the stories revolve around end-of-life scenes. An elderly man is visited by his middle-aged son’s young second wife and child, whom the son has temporarily abandoned in order to tend to his dying ex-wife. A recently widowed woman faces a complicated relationship with a troubled home health-care worker who had been uncommonly kind to her dying husband. Four middle-aged siblings reconvene in their childhood home to attend to the death of their father and find themselves simultaneously children of, and parents to, their own parents. The unobtrusive historical breadth of the stories is remarkable. Reflecting back to Depression-era southern America from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the characters provide us with an intimate view of the changing cultural landscape of our country. Issues of class are not merely ideological here—they are fluid and intricate aspects of fate and of soul. Justice’s prose is characterized by quiet humor and attention to gesture. The deeply self-reflective and self-contained narrators offer us a window into issues of aging and mortality that is real and rare. In the manner of Alice Munro or William Trevor, Jean Ross Justice’s thought-driven fiction centers on pivotal moments of action or conversation that haunt—or reverberate—for decades.

Celebrate feelings in all their shapes and sizes in this New York Times bestselling picture book from the Growing Hearts series! Happiness, sadness, bravery, anger, shyness . . . our hearts can feel so many feelings! Some make us feel as light as a balloon, others as heavy as an elephant. In My Heart explores a full range of emotions, describing how they feel physically, inside, with language that is lyrical but also direct to empower readers to practice articulating and identifying their own emotions. With whimsical illustrations and an irresistible die-cut heart that extends through each spread, this gorgeously packaged and unique feelings book is sure to become a storytime favorite.

In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together. What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

The Family Emotional System: An Integrative Concept for Theory, Science, and Practice presents an ongoing dialogue among scientists, family investigators, and clinicians related to a natural systems view of the family and human behavior that has been occurring over several decades. The concept of the family as an emotional system, as defined in Bowen theory, is presented as the principal integrative concept underlying this dialogue and an effort to move toward a science of human behavior. As a natural system, the family forms the immediate and most important context for individual development, and may be the most central and important environment shaping brain development across the lifetime of the individual. This book explains how the family system can serve as an integrative framework within which specific factual discoveries and hypotheses from many areas of science can be brought together and understood as various manifestations of a coherent whole. The Family Emotional System provides understanding of what is entailed in conceptualizing the family as an emotional system, a sense of the breadth and depth of knowledge the sciences are contributing to this effort, and examples of how this theoretical framework contributes to family research and practice. The richness and excitement occurring in the ongoing dialogue between scientists and Bowen family systems practitioners and researchers is captured along with the promise it holds for the study of human behavior.

“The family is the place where minds come in contact with one another”—Buddha Emotions and the Family reflects the dramatic change in how professionals and practitioners working with today's families view the role of emotions in general family and marital processes. Professionals, researchers, and academics present a wide variety of approaches to the study of emotion and family functioning, providing a rare theoretical and empirical look at how emotions regulate, guide, and influence actions and behaviors within the family. This unique book will provide you with new avenues of research, theory, measurement, and analysis, emphasizing contexts that range from the focus on specific relationships within the family to the impact of contextual influences in family emotionality. Emotions and the Family examines the shift that has taken place in how practitioners and therapists view emotions—as having important interpsychic functions instead of as a function of intrapsychic processes. The book will show you how emotions are involved in almost every aspect of family development: from the beginnings of the family formation (dating, courting, and marriage) to the transition to parenthood (pregnancy, birth, bonding, and attachment) to the dissolution of family relationships (divorce, death). Authors discuss aspects of how the fabric of family life is woven together by the complex interplay of emotions, with essential information on: marital/family relationships parenting socialization sibling relationships family health dysfunctional family processes family therapy and much more! Emotions and the Family functions as an invaluable textbook for graduate studies in family sciences, child development, psychology, social work, and sociology. The book is equally effective as a professional resource for clinical practitioners in psychology, marriage and family therapy, and social work.