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 8.27 inches
Price: $92.00
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 American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s
Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives
Volume 186
Differenz und Gesellschaft
Ethnische Dramen im Englischunterricht am Beispiel von Israel Zangwills 'The Melting Pot' und Angelina Weld Grimkes 'Rachel'
Volume 154
The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period
Volume 78
Bodies and/as Technology
Counter-Discourses on Ethnicity and Globalization in the Works of Alejandro Morales, Larissa Lai and Nalo Hopkinson
Volume 211
Cultural Criticism in Woman’s Experimental Writing
The Poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe
Volume 128
Faces of Fiction
Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity
Volume 92
Writing during the Disasters
Modes of Rendering Suffering in Contemporary Experimental American Poetry
Volume 320
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
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
