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Freak Shows And The Modern American Imagination
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Book Synopsis Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination by : T. Fahy
Download or read book Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination written by T. Fahy and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the artistic use of freak shows between 1900-1950. During this period, the freak show shifted from a highly popular and profitable form of entertainment to a reviled one. But why? And how does this response reflect larger social changes in the United States at the time? Fahy examines this change and how artists responded.
Download or read book Monstrosity written by Alexa Wright and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.
Book Synopsis Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show by : Jessica L. Williams
Download or read book Media, Performative Identity, and the New American Freak Show written by Jessica L. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-04 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates, the freak show model into a “new American freak show.” It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC’s Push Girls (2012-2013), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freak show but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies.
Book Synopsis Freak Show Legacies by : Gary S. Cross
Download or read book Freak Show Legacies written by Gary S. Cross and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.
Book Synopsis Staging Modern American Life by : T. Fahy
Download or read book Staging Modern American Life written by T. Fahy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in the theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theatre history and literary studies, despite offering a hybrid theatre that integrates popular with formal, and mainstream with experimental
Book Synopsis Freak Performances by : Analola Santana
Download or read book Freak Performances written by Analola Santana and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the freak as perceived by the Western gaze has always been a part of the Latin American imaginary, from the letters that Columbus wrote about his encounters with dog-faced people to Shakespeare's Caliban. The freak acquires greater significance in a globalized, neoliberal world that defines the "abnormal" as one who does not conform mentally, physically, or emotionally and is unable or unwilling to follow the economic and cultural norms of the institutions in power. Freak Performances examines the continuing effects of colonialism on modern Latin American identities, with a particular focus on the way it has constructed the body of the other through performance. Theater questions the representations of these bodies, as it enables the empowerment of the silenced other; the freak as a spectacle of otherness finds in performance an opportunity for re-appropriation by artists resisting the dominant authority. Through an analysis of experimental theater, dance theater, performance art, and gallery-based installation art across eight countries, Analola Santana explores the theoretical issues shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different bodies in the current Latin American landscape.
Book Synopsis Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s by : Jane Nicholas
Download or read book Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s written by Jane Nicholas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1973, a five year old girl known as Pookie was exhibited as "The Monkey Girl" at the Canadian National Exhibition. Pookie was the last of a number of children exhibited as 'freaks' in twentieth-century Canada. Jane Nicholas takes us on a search for answers about how and why the freak show persisted into the 1970s. In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900–1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture. Freak shows survived and thrived because of their flexible business model, government support, and by mobilizing cultural and medical ideas of the body and normalcy. This book is the first full length study of the freak show in Canada and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian popular culture, attitudes toward children, and the social construction of able-bodiness. Based on an impressive research foundation, the book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the history of disability, the history of childhood, and the history of consumer culture.
Book Synopsis Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction by : A. Graham-Bertolini
Download or read book Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction written by A. Graham-Bertolini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction. She develops a dynamic model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory and applies it to important texts to broaden our understanding of how law and culture infringe upon women's rights.
Book Synopsis The Philosophy of Horror by : Thomas Fahy
Download or read book The Philosophy of Horror written by Thomas Fahy and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sitting on pins and needles, anxiously waiting to see what will happen next, horror audiences crave the fear and exhilaration generated by a terrifying story; their anticipation is palpable. But they also breathe a sigh of relief when the action is over, when they are able to close their books or leave the movie theater. Whether serious, kitschy, frightening, or ridiculous, horror not only arouses the senses but also raises profound questions about fear, safety, justice, and suffering. From literature and urban legends to film and television, horror’s ability to thrill has made it an integral part of modern entertainment. Thomas Fahy and twelve other scholars reveal the underlying themes of the genre in The Philosophy of Horror. Examining the evolving role of horror, the contributing authors investigate works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), horror films of the 1930s, Stephen King’s novels, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (1980), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Also examined are works that have largely been ignored in philosophical circles, including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985), and James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms (2005). The analysis also extends to contemporary forms of popular horror and “torture-horror” films of the last decade, including Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and The Hills Have Eyes (2006), as well as the ongoing popularity of horror on the small screen. The Philosophy of Horror celebrates the strange, compelling, and disturbing elements of horror, drawing on interpretive approaches such as feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism. The book invites readers to consider horror’s various manifestations and transformations since the late 1700s, probing its social, cultural, and political functions in today’s media-hungry society.
Book Synopsis Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama by : M. Malburne-Wade
Download or read book Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama written by M. Malburne-Wade and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American dramas consciously rewrite the past as a means of determined criticism and intentional resistance. While modern criticism often sees the act of revision as derivative, Malburne-Wade uses Victor Turner's concept of the social drama and the concept of the liminal to argue for a more complicated view of revision.
Book Synopsis American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative by : Jonathan D’Amore
Download or read book American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative written by Jonathan D’Amore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-06-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the conflicted relationship writers have with their public image, particularly when they have written about their personal lives. D'Amore analyzes the autobiographical works of Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, and Dave Eggers in light of theories of authorship, autobiography, and celebrity.
Download or read book Carson McCullers written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Carson McCullers.
Book Synopsis Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories by : M. Bostrom
Download or read book Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories written by M. Bostrom and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-08-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals a female sexual economy in the marketplace of contemporary short fiction which locates a struggle for sexual power between mothers and daughters within a larger struggle to pursue that object of the American dream: whiteness.
Book Synopsis Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature by : E. Mercer
Download or read book Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature written by E. Mercer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of fiction produced in America in the decade following 1945 examines literature by writers such as Kerouac and Bellow. It examines how, though such fiction seemed to resolutely avoid the events and implications of World War II, it was still suffused with dread and suggestions of war in imagery and language.
Book Synopsis Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction by : C. Kocela
Download or read book Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction written by C. Kocela and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the concept of fetishism as a strategy for expressing social and political discontent in American literature, and for negotiating traumatic experiences particular to the second half of the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction by : M. Gauthier
Download or read book Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction written by M. Gauthier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how a political and cultural dynamic of amnesia and truth telling shapes literary constructions of history. Gauthier focuses on the works of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Otsuka.
Book Synopsis American Political Poetry in the 21st Century by : M. Dowdy
Download or read book American Political Poetry in the 21st Century written by M. Dowdy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present. He brings together a unique and diverse collection of poets, including an innovative section on hip hop performance.
