Freak Show Legacies

How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture

Freak Show Legacies
Gary S Cross
RRP:
NZ$ 143.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 121.55
Hardback
h234 x 156mm - 248pg
3 Jun 2021 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781350145139
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9781350145122 UK Paperback $42.49

Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual ' freak' as ' the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of ' the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of ' the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.
Gary Cross makes some intriguing and troubling connections between an earlier fascination in American culture, and contemporary blind spots. An imaginative use of historical perspective. * Peter N. Stearns, Provost Emeritus and University Professor, George Mason University, USA. *
Gary S. Cross is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is the author of several books including Machines of Youth: America' s Car Obsession, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism, and The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children' s Culture.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781350145139
Published: 3 Jun 2021
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format: Hardback
Height: 234mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 248

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