begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. London: Michael O’Mara, 2019.A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War.
The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age. Seeing Is Believing: America’s Sideshows. Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo: Sideshow Freaks, Jabbers and Blade Box Queens.
Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind. Nashville, TN: Casa Flamingo Literary Arts Illustrated Edition, 2014. Includes a detailed bibliography and index. – A lavishly illustrated look at the unique work of sideshow banner artists, with perspectives on all of the major artists. Painters of the Peculiar: A Guide to Sideshow Banner Artists and their Respective Work. Sarasota, FL: Carnival Publishers of Sarasota, 1972, 1981. A Pictorial History of the American Carnival. American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1996.
Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2015ĭrimmer, Fredrick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.īrett, Mary and Stevan Gould. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.īogdan, Robert. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination.
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