Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms late modernist freakish aesthetics a creative fusion of high and low themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. This narrative perspective subverts and reinvents high modernist literary and social ideologies.

This updated, new edition of this book explores the emergence of what the author terms "late modernist freakish aesthetics" a creative fusion of "high" and "low" themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about "freaks" by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the dysteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about "freaks" defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

Autorentext

Nancy Bombaci, Associate Professor of Writing and Literature in New London, Connecticut, received her Ph.D. in English from Fordham University. She has published articles on modern and postmodern fiction. Her interests also include disability studies, performance studies, writing pedagogy, and creative writing.

Inhalt
Acknowledgments Introduction Degeneration, Anti- Semitism, and the Enfreakment of Modernism Nathanael West's Aspiring Freakish Flâneurs Well of Course, I Used to Be Absolutely Gorgeous, Dear: The Female Interviewer as Subject/ Object in Djuna Barnes's Journalism Heredity, Transvestism, and the Limits of Self- Fashioning in Nightwood Horror, Melodrama, and Mutable Masculine Identity in Tod Browning's Films ''This Thing I Long For I Know Not What: Carson McCullers and the Melodrama of the Domesticated Freak Conclusion: Deviance, Defiance, and the Problem of Weirdness Afterword: The Freakish Flâneur Reconsidered Bibliography Index.