Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers

Bombaci, Nancy
Hakutani, Yoshinobu

Paperback

Series: Modern American Literature, Book 75

Literary Criticism19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Latin American History

ISBN10: 1636675905
ISBN13: 9781636675909
Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
Published: Feb 26 2024
Pages: 212
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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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