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Reading the Antimodern Way: G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence and Imperialist Reading for White American Boys
- The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2019
- pp. 7-25
- 10.1353/hcy.2019.0001
- Article
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Abstract:
Although many scholars studying young adult literature point to psychologist G. Stanley Hall and his 1904 monograph Adolescence as foundational, few examine how Hall’s reading recommendations helped construct what Leerom Medovoi called the “protagonization of the American character” fifty years before Medovoi’s start date and how this character reinforced American white male hegemonic power. Hall advocated for a new genre entitled “ephebic literature,” one based upon antimodernist models that, Fasteland argues, would promote citizenship over individual fulfilment. The texts Hall chose would subsequently create adolescent “types” designed to reinforce white supremacy at home and his imperialist agenda abroad.