acknowledgments

When I try to think about how I got here, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. This book would not have been possible without the support of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, especially my department chair, Marco Abel, who was tireless in his advocacy of me and my research before I was on the tenure track. I am thankful for the many colleagues who discussed parts of this work with me and encouraged me along the way, including Matt Cohen, Maureen Honey, Amelia Montes, Ken Price, Timothy Schaffert, and Roland Végső. Many thanks also to those colleagues who worked with me to expand our children’s literature curriculum, including Amanda Gailey, Mike Page, Pascha Stevenson, Laura White, and our undergraduate chair, Guy Reynolds. Thank you to all my friends old and new in Lincoln who let me complain, talked theory, and made me feel less alone while writing—James Brunton, Emily Kazyak, Lauren Gatti, Allison Rusler, Robert Lipscomb, Anne Johnson, Celie Knudsen, Kamryn Sannicks, Rachael Shah, Pete Capuano, Katie Anania, and Mel Plaut.

My heart is still full of love for the University of Pittsburgh, where this project began. I am forever grateful to my committee members Jean Carr, Steve Carr, Nancy Glazener, Marah Gubar, and Kathleen Blee for their guidance, sharp questions, and investment in my work. Jean was exactly the chair I needed, open to the expansive scope of this project and willing to accept me exactly as I was. I will never forget Steve’s sound advice to go back to an early draft and to state my argument in its most ambitious terms. With his characteristic brand of humor and honesty, he said, “Would you rather be shot as a sheep or a goat?” These words have shaped the spirit of my work ever since, giving me permission to appear in my writing as myself from the beginning. Thanks to the faculty and friends at Pitt who were with me along the way, including Dave Bartholomae, Julie Beaulieu, Troy Boone, Jess Enoch, Beth Matway, Todd Reeser, Mariolina Salvatori, Jim Seitz, Pamela VanHaitsma, Annette Vee, Courtney Weikle-Mills, and Emily Wender. A special thanks to Jim Kincaid, who read work in progress and offered many words of support during the time he spent at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2009. I am forever grateful to Bill Scott, who had the great insight to encourage me to apply to Pitt in the first place, when I was still a master’s student at New Mexico State. Likewise, the support and mentorship of Brian Rourke and Liz Schirmer at NMSU was vital in my survival as a graduate student and as a human, when I was really alone and had no idea what I was doing. And Barbara Ryan, who was my professor at University of Missouri–Kansas City, may be the origin of it all, radically disrupting social norms and traditional literary study in an undergraduate survey course where I encountered Foucault for the first time. Thank you, for everything.

I am immensely grateful to friends and colleagues who have talked with me over the years about this work at conferences and over email, especially Jules Gill-Peterson, Angel Daniel Matos, Jacob Breslow, and Kate Slater. A special thanks to Sarah Chinn and Rebekah Sheldon for providing reader reviews of this book for the University of Georgia Press—this feedback was instrumental in bringing the book into its current form. Thanks also to my editors at UGA, including Elizabeth Crowley, who first encouraged me to develop this project into book form, as well as Patrick Allen and Nate Holly, who saw it through its beginning stages to the very end.

The generous support of an Arts and Sciences Research Travel Grant from the University of Pittsburgh allowed me to spend a number of weeks at the Wellcome Library in London and at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, where I was able to immerse myself in sets of materials that continue to complicate and enrich my thinking about adolescence to this day. And grateful acknowledgment to the publication venues in which I had the opportunity to work through earlier versions of the arguments that appear in this book as well as all the anonymous readers and line editors that gave their time to my writing and ideas. A small section of my introduction was published as “Adolescence” in the inaugural Keywords issue of Trans-gender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 22–24, and it appears here with the permission of Duke University Press. An abbreviated version of chapter 1 was previously published as “‘The Absurdities and Crudities of Adolescence’: Nineteenth-Century Logics of Development and the Politics of Difference,” in Nineteenth Century Studies 31 (2019). Special thanks to Sarah Wadsworth for her clarifying edits on this piece. An abbreviated version of chapter 3 was published under the title “Toward a Theory of Adolescence: Queer Disruptions in Representations of Adolescent Reading,” in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7, no. 1 (2015): 110–34.

Writing this book has clarified for me more than ever that the change I want to see in the world can happen only in the practices of my lived life, not just as words on the page. I could not have anticipated how profoundly my small children would challenge me, not only to think about childhood beyond the level of academic critique, but to continually do the healing work needed for me to meet them where they are and love better than my parents could. Ruth Schwartz and my therapists over the years, Joellen Popma, Rose Zingrone, and Anne Gilligan, were guides in this process that pushed this project to another level. Thanks also to my dear friend Danielle Meister for all that we have learned together and to my brother, Chad Owen, and sister-in-law, Tara Beeston, for being my family. And to Stacey Waite, for whom there are no words—everything good in my life is because of you. Thank you for believing in me when I did not believe in myself. Thank you for loving me when I could not love myself. Thank you for the countless hours listening and problem solving when I thought I could not write any more. Thank you for reading every word as I wrote it and then reading it again. Thank you for the endless hours of solo parenting you did so that I could write. This book exists because of you.