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Palgrave Macmillan

Neo-Victorian Freakery

The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show

  • Book
  • © 2015

Overview

Authors:
  1. Helen Davies
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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vi
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  2. Introduction: Distorted Images and Re-membered Bodies: Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 1-21

  3. Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 22-60

  4. Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and Eng Bunker

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 61-91

  5. Excessively Feminine? Anna Swan, Gendering Giantesses, and the Genre of the ‘True Life Story’ Pamphlet

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 92-120

  6. Innocence, Experience, and Childhood Dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 121-158

  7. The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick and Spectacles of Deviance

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 159-196

  8. Afterword: The Neo-Victorian Enfreakment of P. T. Barnum

    • Helen Davies
    Pages 197-206

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 207-239
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“The current volume extends the analysis to the reappearance of Victorian freaks in contemporary fiction, plays, films, graphic novels, and television. … provides many perspectives, including her own, on the original experiences of Sarah Baartman … . Davies demonstrates that long-dead freaks still raise disturbing questions about sexuality, race, and otherness. Extensive notes. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.” (R. Sugarman, Choice, Vol. 53 (9), May, 2016)

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.
 

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