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.
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
Poetics of Politics
Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture
Volume 258
Undoing Difference?
Race and Gender in Selected Works by Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson
Volume 224
There is More than One Site of Resistance
Ironie und Parodie im zeitgenossischen Roman der Chicanos/as
Volume 98
Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetic Architecture of Revolt
An Axial Analysis
Volume 312
Re-Imagining Nature’s Nation
Native American and Native Hawaiian Literature, Environment, and Empire
Volume 267
Voices of the Down and Out
The Dust Bowl Migration and the Great Depression in the Songs of Woody Guthrie
Volume 153
AlterNative Spaces
Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations' Literatures
Volume 146
Betwixt, between, or beyond?
Negotiating 'Trans' formations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry
Volume 215
Kulturkontakt und Racial Presences
Afro-Amerikaner und die deutsche Amerika-Literatur, 1815-1914
Volume 126
Perspectives on Values
The Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode
Volume 323
Similar Books
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
As Messianism Turns to Heresy
The Regenstein Chair Lectures On Lurianic Kabbalah and Shabbatai Tzevi at Hebrew Union College - Cincinnati
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Cahiers de littérature française
Les Métamorphoses du texte. Enjeux intertextuels et transpositions visuelles
Volume 25
European Drama and Performance Studies
Dramatisations politiques. Théâtre, politique et idéologie au XIXe siècle (1806-1914)
Volume 27
Food Security under Armed Conflict
Global Knowledge Landscape and Public Attention to Social, Economic, and Humanitarian Dimensions
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
LiCArC
Trauma et création artistique : l’engagement des artistes arabes dans des dynamiques de résiliences
Volume 14
Myths and Tales of the Inughuit
Erik Holtved's Polar Eskimo Texts Revised and Re-translated into Danish and English
Volume 475, 12
