Male Homosexuality in Children’s Literature, 1867–1918

Eric L. Tribunella, Professor of English, teaches children’s and young adult literature and gay studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature (2010), the co-author of Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (2013/2019), and the co-editor of A de Grummond Primer: Highlights of the Children’s Literature Collection (2021). He edited a critical edition of Edward Prime-Stevenson’s 1891 boys’ novel Left to Themselves (2016), 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).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgments Introduction Uncovering the Early History of Gay Children’s LiteratureChapter 1 New York City and the Proto-Uranian Street Boys of Alger’s Ragged Dick SeriesChapter 2 Boys as Noble Uranians: Eduard Bertz’s The French Prisoners and the Discourse of SexologyChapter 3 Suicide, Self-Sacrifice, and Uranian Schoolboys in Howard Sturgis’s Tim and Horace Vachell’s The HillChapter 4 Between Boys: Coding Young Uranians in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Left to Themselves and White CockadesChapter 5 The Adult Tutor and the Young Uranian: Greek Love in John Gambril Nicholson’s In Carrington’s Duty-Week and The Romance of a Choir BoyChapter 6 E.F. Benson’s David Blaize Books and Boys as the "Third Sex"Conclusion "The Future May be Trusted to Decide": Boy Books and the Possibilities of Gay Children’s LiteratureIndex