Male Homosexuality In Children S Literature 1867 1918

In his 1908 cultural and historical study of homosexuality titled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson includes a section on homosexual juvenile fiction, perhaps the first attempt to identify a body of children’s literature about male homosexuality in English. Known for pioneering the explicitly gay American novel for adults, Stevenson was also one of the first thinkers to take seriously the possibility and value of homosexual children, whom he called "young Uranians." This book takes as its starting point Stevenson’s catalog of homosexual boy books around the turn of the century and offers a critical examination of these works, along with others by gay writers who wrote for children from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War I. Stevenson’s list includes Eduard Bertz, Howard Sturgis, Horace Vachell, and Stevenson himself—to which Horatio Alger, John Gambril Nicholson, and E.F. Benson are added. Read alongside major developments in English- and German-language sexology, these boy books can be understood as participating in the construction and dissemination of the discourse of sexuality and as constituting the figure of the young Uranian as central to modern gay identity.

"In his 1908 cultural and historical study of homosexuality titled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (1908), Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson includes a section on homosexual juvenile fiction, perhaps the first attempt to identify a body of children's literature about male homosexuality in English. Known for pioneering the explicitly gay American novel for adults, Stevenson was also one of the first thinkers to take seriously the possibility and value of homosexual children, whom he called "young Uranians." This book takes as its starting point Stevenson's catalog of homosexual boy books around the turn of the century and offers a critical examination of these works, along with others by gay writers who wrote for children from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War I. Stevenson's list includes Eduard Bertz, Howard Sturgis, Horace Vachell, and Stevenson himself--to which I add Horatio Alger, John Gambril Nicholson, and E.F. Benson. Read alongside major developments in English- and German-language sexology, these boy books can be understood as participating in the construction and dissemination of the discourse of sexuality and as constituting the figure of the young Uranian as central to modern gay identity"--

Scholars in the field of children’s literature studies began taking an interest in the concept of “liminal spaces” around the turn of the 21st century. For the first time, Liminal Spaces in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between brings together in one volume a collection of original essays on this topic by leading children’s literature scholars. The contributors in this collection take a wide variety of approaches to their explorations of liminal spaces in children’s and young adult literature. Some discuss how children’s books portray the liminal nature of physical spaces, such as the children’s room in a library. Others deal with more abstract portrayals, such as the imaginary space where Max goes to escape the reality of his bedroom in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. All of the contributors, however, provide keen insights into how liminal spaces figure in children’s and young adult literature.

Performing Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child examines the changing nature of contemporary childhoods by exploring how children’s and young people’s digital media create new ideas about youth agency. Visual cultures of childhood have been traditionally traced in photography. Material cultures of childhood have been likewise traced in archives, scripts and even toys. This book shows that performance cultures and their digital literacies – expressed in viral forms such as TikTok dance challenges, tweets and viral GIFs – create new ideas about childhood by positioning young people as authors and owners of their self-representations. With the global pandemic in its immediate backdrop, the book finds that reshaped social relations and a context of crisis in our political, social and ecological realms cultivate nostalgia for ideals of innocent childhood that only promise to be disrupted by the complex, ambiguous and ultimately resistive acts young people appear to generate for and about themselves. This book is ideal for students and scholars of childhood studies, performance studies, social and cultural history and visual and digital culture.

Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age. Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

"By the dawn of the twentieth century Budapest was on its way to becoming a cosmopolitan metropolis. The 'Pearl of the Danube' boasted some of Europe's most beguiling architectural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics, fostering its centrality as an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. As historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture-including a robust homosexual subculture. Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 is her riveting story of non-normative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the its capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality between East and West, Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 demolishes myths identifying queer life with the failures of late-twentieth-century liberalism and instead recuperates queer sociality as an integral part of Budapest's-and Hungary's-modern incarnation"--