The Freak

This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The essays explore the locally specific dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their particular historical, cultural and political context. Thus the impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, or the Chernobyl catastrophe is observed closely and yet the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries’ diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European teratology in British medical journals, and the Hollywood silver screen’s colonization of European fantasies about deformity. Although Continental European freaks are introduced as products of ideologically-infiltrated representations, they also emerge as embodied subjects endowed with their own voice, view, and subversive agency.

A groundbreaking analysis of the operations to bodies and narratives that inform - and form - Francophone literature.

In this book, Jason B. Dorwart contends that the material presence of visible disability disrupts the framing devices that provide safe distancing for theatre’s fictive nature. Conceptions of disability that place the disabled body into a permanently liminal space between life and death are directly at odds with theatrical performances, which are geared toward moving through liminality into a new point of stasis. Dorwart reveals how this contradiction leads to performance practices that work to marginalize and eliminate the presence of disabled bodies of both character and actor, as disabled characters have historically been written with different character arcs than nondisabled characters and with the assumption that they would be played by nondisabled actors. As more disabled actors gain exposure in film and theatre, the difference in how disabled characters are written is also increasingly affected by whether the role is intended for a disabled or nondisabled actor. These performances are enacting new means to performatively and figuratively reincorporate or eliminate the liminal disabled body. The Incorporeal Corpse demonstrates how recent plays and films try to rectify this tension between the permanence of disability and the transitory nature of performance. Scholars of theatre, disability studies, and performance studies will find this book of particular interest.

Analyzes the intertwined metaphoric language of capitalism and disease in nineteenth-century England.