Uranians
group of male pederastic poets active 1858–1930, mostly English but with some U.S. and French members
The Uranians were a late-19th-century and early-20th-century clandestine group of up to several dozen male homosexual poets and prose writers who principally wrote on the subject of the love of (or by) adolescent boys. In a strict definition they were an English literary and cultural movement; in a broader definition there were also American Uranians. The movement reached its peak between the late 1880s and mid 1890s, but has been regarded as stretching between 1858, when William Johnson Cory's poetry collection Ionica appeared, and 1930, the year of publication of Samuel Elsworth Cottam's Cameos of Boyhood and Other Poems and of E. E. Bradford's last collection, Boyhood.
Etymology
English advocates of homosexual emancipation such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds took to using the term "Uranian" to describe a comradely love that would bring about true democracy. The word was coined on the basis of classical sources, being inspired principally by the epithet Aphrodite Urania as discussed in Plato's Symposium. Plato distinguishes two forms of the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, "the elder, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite [Urania] — she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione — her we call 'common' [Pandemos]." Aphrodite Urania represents a more "celestial" love of body and soul, whereas Aphrodite Pandemos represents a more physical lust.
The term Uranian came to be much used in the circle of Uranian writers for its novelty and euphoniousness, its literal meaning "heavenly" giving it a cachet of the noble and sublime. While the same classical sources supplied the German coinage "Urning" for male homosexuals, as used by the German theorist and campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s, this German derivation ran parallel to the English derivation "Uranian" rather than being its source.
Movement
The Uranian writers formed a rather cohesive group with a well-expressed philosophy. Their work is characterized by an idealised appeal to the history of Ancient Greece, as well as by a use of conservative verse forms.
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