Enfreakment: The Poetics and Politics of Freak Show Legacies in US Culture
Edited by Ella Ernst Edited by Katja Kanzler Edited by Leonie M. J. Kratzenstein Edited by Laura Michelle Pröger Edited by Annika Schadewaldt Edited by Stefan Schubert
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(October 2026)
ISBN: 9783825397678
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $92.00
On back order
This volume examines “enfreakment” as the cultural logic through which certain bodies, characters, and traits are framed as “freakish” across US culture. Exploring the scripts that underwrite figurations of freakishness, the collection illuminates how freak-show logics persist across contemporary media and continue to shape the spectacularization of bodies, identities, and communities.
Bringing together contributions on film, reality TV, fanfiction, comics, novels, and other literary works and popular media, the collection approaches enfreakment as a performative and aesthetic process through which difference is staged, circulated, and consumed. In doing so, the volume highlights the enduring cultural power of the freak-show and its legacies and explores how they continue to inform negotiations of normalcy and belonging in US culture.
- Edited by Ella Ernst
- Edited by Katja Kanzler
- Edited by Leonie M. J. Kratzenstein
- Edited by Laura Michelle Pröger
- Edited by Annika Schadewaldt
- Edited by Stefan Schubert
Other Titles in this Series
The Anticipation of Catastrophe
Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture
Volume 247
Jewish Organizations in Transatlantic Perspective
Patterns of Contemporary Jewish Politics in Germany and the United States
Volume 226
America and the Americans in Postwar British Fiction
An Imagological Study of Selected Novels
Volume 138
Temple Grandin and the Mediation of Autism Debates at the Interface between Life Writing and the Life Sciences
Volume 313
Mensch als Methode
Allgemeine Hermeneutik und partielle Demokratie: Friedrich Schleiermacher - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Frederick Douglass
Volume 272
National Dreams and Rude Awakenings
Essays on American Literature, from the Puritans to the Postmodern
Volume 194
Weird American Music
Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music
Volume 299
Beyond the ‘Imaginary Indian’
Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identitat & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
Volume 171
Aesthetic Transgressions
Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Festschrift fur Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag
Volume 131
Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle
Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction
Volume 279
Provincializing the United States
Colonialism, Decolonization, and (Post)Colonial Governance in Transnational Perspective
Volume 248
Recollection, Memory and Imagination
Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov
Volume 132
Seeing and Perceiving
Synesthetic Perception, Embodied Intersubjectivity, and Gender Masquerade in Siri Hustvedt's Works
Volume 311
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