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Book Synopsis

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.

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

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    A Paperback by Nancy Bombaci

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      Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
      Publication Date: Publication Date: 1/26/2024
      ISBN13: 9781636675909, 978-1636675909
      ISBN10: 1636675905

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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.

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