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Record Nr. |
UNINA9910778402703321 |
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Autore |
Durbach Nadja <1971-> |
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Titolo |
The spectacle of deformity : freak shows and modern British culture / / Nadja Durbach |
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Pubbl/distr/stampa |
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Berkeley : , : University of California Press, , 2009 |
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ISBN |
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1-282-35997-5 |
9786612359972 |
0-520-94489-5 |
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Descrizione fisica |
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1 online resource (xiii, 273 pages) |
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Disciplina |
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Soggetti |
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Abnormalities, Human - Great Britain - History - 19th century |
Freak shows - Great Britain - History - 19th century |
Human body - Social aspects - Great Britain - History - 19th century |
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Lingua di pubblicazione |
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Formato |
Materiale a stampa |
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Livello bibliografico |
Monografia |
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Nota di bibliografia |
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Includes bibliographical references and index. |
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Nota di contenuto |
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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Exhibiting Freaks -- 1 / Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Reexamining "the Elephant Man" -- 2 / Two Bodies, Two Selves, Two Sexes: Conjoined Twins and "the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy" -- 3 / The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Evolution, Imperialism, and "Primitive" Sexuality -- 4 / Aztecs and Earthmen: Declining Civilizations and Dying Races -- 5 / "When the Cannibal King Began to Talk": Performing Race, Class, and Ethnicity -- Conclusion / The Decline of the Freak Show -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index |
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Sommario/riassunto |
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In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal |
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Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British-at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities. |
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