Freak Show Legacies: How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture

(Hardback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

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. *

Author Bio

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: Americas Car Obsession, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism, and The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Childrens Culture.