Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2017
Abstract
Based on an intense research into the local history of freak show in the city of Prague, the presentation investigates how the emergence of the mass entertainment culture in the last decades of the 19th century and the subsequent changes before and after WWI transformed the already existing culture of exhibiting "abnormities" by gradual professionalization and internationalization of the business. The proposed presentation describes the ways in which these transformations affected the strategies of representation used for presenting "human oddities", asks about the social composition of its audience and about the ways freaks were "consumed" and interpreted in the local context of Prague between 1860s-1920s.