ABSTRACT
In 1873 American readers had come to expect certain ripely romantic qualities in books about travel to foreign lands, and perhaps even a certain overripeness when these books described life in the tropics. Exotic sights, sounds, smells, and tastes were to be vividly re-created so that armchair travelers could escape for a few minutes into the only paradise they would know this side of Heaven. In South Sea Idyls ,Charles Warren Stoddard gave these readers all the lushness they could desire, plus a dollop of dreamy homoeroticism, which, astoundingly, hardly anyone seemed to recognize as such.
