Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show

by Helen Davies

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137402554
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	09/07/2015
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	239
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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