Melancholia and Maturation

"e;Coming of age"e; 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 fundamental response to loss, arguing that the low-grade symptoms of melancholia are in fact what characterize the mature, sober, and responsible American adult. Melancholia and Maturation looks at how this effect is achieved in a society that purports to protect youngsters from every possible source of danger, thus requiring melancholia to be induced artificially.Each of the book's five chapters focuses on a different kind of lost object sacrificed so as to propel the child toward a distinctively gendered, sexual, ethical, and national adulthood-from same-sex friends to the companionship of boy-and-his-dog stories, from the lost ideals of historical fiction about the American Revolution to the children killed or traumatized in Holocaust novels. The author examines a wide spectrum of works-including Jack London's dog tales, the contemporary "e;realistic"e; novels of S. E. Hinton, and Newbery Medal winners like Johnny Tremain and Bridge to Terabithia.Tribunella raises fundamental questions about the value of children's literature as a whole and provides context for understanding why certain books become required reading for youth.