Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature examines exclusive classics of children’s literature either previous and new—including L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House sequence, J. ok. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, Lemony Snicket’s a chain of unlucky Events, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series—to discover the queer tensions among innocence and heterosexuality inside their pages. Pugh argues that kids can't maintain their innocence of sexuality whereas studying approximately normative heterosexuality, but this inherent paradox runs all through many vintage narratives of literature for younger readers. Children’s literature ordinarily endorses heterosexuality via its invisible presence because the de facto sexual identification of numerous protagonists and their households, but heterosexuality’s ubiquity is counterbalanced by way of its occlusion while authors safeguard their readers from forthright concerns of 1 of humanity’s most simple and primal instincts.

The booklet demonstrates that tensions among innocence and sexuality render a lot of children’s literature queer, in particular while those texts disavow sexuality via celebrations of innocence. during this unique examine, Pugh develops interpretations of sexuality that few critics haven't begun ventured, paving the best way for destiny scholarly engagement with higher questions about the ideological position of kid's literature and representations of kid's sexuality.

Tison Pugh is affiliate Professor within the division of English on the college of important Florida. he's the writer of Queering Medieval Genres and Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in heart English Literature and has released on children’s literature in such journals as Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Marvels and Tales.