TY  - BOOK
AU  - Nancy Bombaci
PY  - 2024
CY  - New York, United States of America
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 9781636676678
TI  - Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture
T2  - Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers
DO  - 10.3726/b21230
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1389860
N2  - 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.
KW  - Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Carson McCullers, freaks, flaneurs, carnival studies, disability studies, modernist studies, dysteleology
LA  - English
ER  -