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Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender

Online ISBN:
9781496845368
Print ISBN:
9781496845313
Publisher:
University Press of Mississippi
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Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender

Tison Pugh
Tison Pugh
University of Central Florida
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
21 April 2023
Online ISBN:
9781496845368
Print ISBN:
9781496845313
Publisher:
University Press of Mississippi

Abstract

L. Frank Baum’s novels revel in queer, trans, and other transgressive themes. Best known for his Oz series, Baum produced a staggering number of additional titles under pseudonyms including Laura Bancroft, Suzanne Metcalf, and Schuyler Staunton, among others. Envisioning his fantasy works as progressive fictions, Baum aspired to create in the Oz series “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” More than thematically progressive, his works are often sexually progressive as well, with surprisingly queer and trans touches that reject standard narrative paths of heteroerotic love and marriage. From these foundations, this volume also addresses the queer undercurrents of Oz’s cannibalistic themes, the contributions of illustrator John R. Neill to Baum’s queer visions, the homosocial desires flourishing in the Boy Fortune Hunter series (credited to “Floyd Akers”), and the queer intersection of genre and familial desire in the Aunt Jane’s Niecesseries (credited to “Edith Van Dyne”). Baum’s fictions are of foundational significance to any canon of queer children’s literature, yet today’s readers cannot overlook the derogatory views expressed about people of various races and ethnicities, which requires an ethically informed intersectional perspective to engage more productively with cultural works of the past. In its breadth, scope, and detail, Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum’s Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender promises to transform readers’ views of the author, his fictions, and the queer themes bubbling beneath the surface of early twentieth-century children’s literature.

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