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Uranian Children's Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England: The Romance of Youth considers how writers associated with the Uranian poets, Order of Chaeronea, and British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP)-among the earliest efforts to organize on behalf of same-sex love in England beginning in the mid-1890s-used boys' fiction to imagine a world in which same-sex romantic bonds could be possible. Some of the central figures in the early gay movement in England wrote for children or influenced others who did, and these juvenile writings both contributed to a larger discourse of homosexual emancipation and addressed the interests of Uranian youth. Uranian writers and members of the Order of Chaeronea and BSSSP recognized how the conditions of modern life posed distinct challenges to shaping the character of boys, and they used children's literature and the rhetoric of chivalry to propose solutions to the boy problem and promote their vision of a homosexual future. This volume provides the first book-length account of the role of children's literature in the early gay movement in England, including works by E.E. Bradford, George Cecil Ives, J.M Barrie, Laurence Housman, Kenneth Ingram, and Beverley Nichols.
List of contents
Introduction. Boyhood and Youth in the Early Gay Movement in England 1. The Boy Problem, Chivalric Same-sex Love, and Uranian Children's Literature 2. Following His Flag: E.E. Bradford's Chivalric Boyhood Romances and Imperial Adventure Fiction 3. The Forbidden Loves of Fairyland: Laurence Housman's Fairy Tales and the Fellow-Feeling of Childhood 4. Peter Pan and the Uranian Movement: J.M. Barrie, George Cecil Ives, and the New Ganymede 5. "I'm Not What I Thought I Was.": Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexual Futurism in Archibald Kenneth Ingram's Boy Books 6. The Beginning of the End: Beverley Nichols's
Prelude, the Uranian School Story, and the Death of the Movement Conclusion. The Speculative Vision of Uranian Juvenile Romance and the Sacrifice of Boys
About the author
Eric L. Tribunella, Professor of English, teaches children's and young adult literature at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of
The Young Uranians: Male Homosexuality in Children's Literature, 1867-1918 and
Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children's Literature, the co-author of
Reading Young Adult Literature: A Critical Introduction and
Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction, and the co-editor of
A de Grummond Primer: Highlights of the Children's Literature Collection. He edited a critical edition of Edward Prime-Stevenson's 1891 boys' novel
Left to Themselves, and among his various journal articles and book chapters, he contributed the essay on children's literature and childhood studies to the
Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014).
