Neo-Victorian Freakery explores the way in which contemporary fiction, film, and television has revisited the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers. It locates the neo-Victorian freak show as a crucial forum for debating the politics of disability, gender, sexuality and race within the genre more broadly.
Introduction: Distorted images and re-membered bodies: Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery 1. Mixing (re)memory and desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman 2. Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and Eng Bunker 3. Excessively feminine? Anna Swan, gendering giantesses, and the genre of the 'true life story' pamphlet 4. Innocence, experience, and childhood dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren 5. The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick and spectacles of deviance Notes Bibliography Index
