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Willa Cather's Lost Boy: "Paul's Case" and Bohemian Tramping

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From: The Arizona Quarterly
Date: 20040701
Author:Herring, Terrell Scott

WILLA GATHER ALWAYS HAD A SPECIAL INTEREST IN BOYS, but it certainly wasn't sexual. Turn-of- the -century typologies of male adolescence, however, anxiously circulated alongside typologies of (homo)sexual perversion. The paramount instance of this connection occurs in child psychologist G. Stanle y Hall's widely popular Adolescence (1904), an encyclopedic overview of "boyology" that practically invents its subject matter ex nihilu. Hall argues throughout that "adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born" (xiii); yet various disorders-neuroses, ...

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