Neo-Victorian Freakery

Neo-Victorian Freakery explores the way in which contemporary fiction, film, and television has revisited the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers. It locates the neo-Victorian freak show as a crucial forum for debating the politics of disability, gender, sexuality and race within the genre more broadly.

The current volume extends the analysis to the reappearance of Victorian freaks in contemporary fiction, plays, films, graphic novels, and television. provides many perspectives, including her own, on the original experiences of Sarah Baartman . Davies demonstrates that long-dead freaks still raise disturbing questions about sexuality, race, and otherness. Extensive notes. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. (R. Sugarman, Choice, Vol. 53 (9), May, 2016)

Autorentext
Helen Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (2012), and has published widely on gender and sexuality in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature.

Inhalt

Introduction: Distorted images and re-membered bodies: Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery

1. Mixing (re)memory and desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman
2. Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and Eng Bunker
3. Excessively feminine? Anna Swan, gendering giantesses, and the genre of the 'true life story' pamphlet
4. Innocence, experience, and childhood dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren
5. The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick and spectacles of deviance
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index