| Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers Contributor(s): Hakutani, Yoshinobu (Editor), Bombaci, Nancy (Author) |
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ISBN: 0820478326 ISBN-13: 9780820478326 Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi OUR PRICE: $98.80 Product Type: Hardcover Published: November 2005 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Latin America - General - History | United States - 20th Century - Literary Criticism | European - German |
| Dewey: 813.520 |
| LCCN: 2004027475 |
| Series: Modern American Literature: New Approaches |
| Physical Information: 178 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. 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 disteleology, 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. |