1st Edition

Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England The Romance of Youth

By Eric L. Tribunella Copyright 2026
244 Pages
by Routledge

244 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

Introduction               

Boyhood and Youth in the Early Gay Movement in England

Chapter 1                   

The Boy Problem, Chivalric Same-Sex Love, and Uranian Children’s Literature

Chapter 2              

Following His Flag: E.E. Bradford’s Chivalric Boyhood Romances and Imperial Adventure Fiction

Chapter 3                   

The Forbidden Loves of Fairyland: Laurence Housman’s Fairy Tales and the Fellow-Feeling of Childhood

Chapter 4                   

Peter Pan and the Uranian Movement: J.M. Barrie, George Cecil Ives, and the New Ganymede   

Chapter 5                   

“I’m Not What I Thought I Was”: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexual Futurism in Archibald Kenneth Ingram’s Boy Books

Chapter 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

Biography

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).