Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

Nancy Bombaci, Associate Professor of Writing and Literature in New London, Connecticut, received her Ph.D. in English from Fordham University. She has published articles on modern and postmodern fiction. Her interests also include disability studies, performance studies, writing pedagogy, and creative writing.

• Acknowledgments – Introduction – Degeneration, Anti- Semitism, and the Enfreakment of Modernism – Nathanael West’s Aspiring Freakish Flâneurs – “Well of Course, I Used to Be Absolutely Gorgeous, Dear”: The Female Interviewer as Subject/ Object in Djuna Barnes’s Journalism – Heredity, Transvestism, and the Limits of Self- Fashioning in Nightwood – Horror, Melodrama, and Mutable Masculine Identity in Tod Browning’s Films – ‘‘This Thing I Long For I Know Not What”: Carson McCullers and the Melodrama of the Domesticated Freak – Conclusion: Deviance, Defiance, and the Problem of “Weirdness” – Afterword: The Freakish Flâneur Reconsidered – Bibliography – Index.