Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms -late modernist freakish aesthetics- a creative fusion of -high- and -low- themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about -freaks- by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early...