Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination

by Rachel Adams

Book Overview

A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. 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. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226005399
• ISBN13: 9780226005393
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"