Melancholia and maturation : the use of trauma in American children's literature / Eric L. Tribunella.

Losing and using queer youth -- A boy and his dog -- Knowing, unknowing, and the achievement of young adulthood -- Melancholic development and Revolutionary War fiction for children -- Melancholic sacrifice and the Holocaust in American children's culture -- Coda: physical trauma, childhood embodiment, and children's literature.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Coming of age in children's fiction often means achieving maturity through the experience of trauma. In classics ranging from Old Yeller to The Outsiders, a narrative of psychological pain defies expectations of childhood as a time of innocence and play. In this provocative new book, Eric L. Tribunella explores why trauma, especially the loss of a loved object, occurs in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed twentieth-century American fiction for children. Tribunella draws on queer theory and feminist revisions of Freud's notion of melancholia, which is described as a fundame.

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