Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England

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).

• 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