Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote

Freak Shows and the Modern American Imaginationexamines the artistic use of freak shows between 1900 and 1950. During this period, the freak show shifted from a highly popular and profitable form of entertainment to a reviled one. But why? And how does this response reflect larger social changes in the United States at the time? Artists responded to this change by using the freakish body as a tool for exploring problematic social attitudes about race, disability, and sexual desire in American culture. The freak body in art not only reveals disturbing truths about early twentieth-century prejudices, but it also becomes a space for exploring the profound social impact of contemporary events such as the Great Migration, World War I, and the Great Depression.

Thomas Fahy is a Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus.  He is the author of Staging Modern American Life, as well as three novels.  He is the editor of The Philosophy of Horror; Considering Aaron Sorkin; Considering David Chase; and Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre.

 

 

Introduction * â€œHelpless Meannessâ€�: Constructing the Black Body as Freakish Spectacle * War-Injured Bodies: Fallen Soldiers in American Propaganda and the Works of John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner * Worn, Damaged Bodies in the Great Depression: FSA Photography and the Fiction of John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, and Nathanael West * “Some Unheard-of Thingâ€�: Freaks, Families, and Coming of Age in Carson McCullers and Truman Capote's Breakfast at Brian's * Epilogue