Description

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag’s 1964 cornerstone essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: Some Notes on “Notes”
Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. Drushel

Part I: Camp in Literature

Chapter 1: Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian “Sicko”
Barbara Jane Brickman

Chapter 2: Queer Ideology in the Novels of Joe Keenan
Robert Kellerman

Part II: Camp and Celebrity

Chapter 3: Authentic Artifice: Dolly Parton's Negotiations of Sontag's Camp
Emily Deering Crosby and Hannah Lynn

Chapter 4: Diva Worship as a Queer Poetics of Waste in D. Gilson's Brit Lit
Chris Philpot

Chapter 5: Camping in the Closet: Susan Sontag and the Construction of the Celebrity Persona
Tim Cusack

Part III: Camp on Television

Chapter 6: Vicious Camp: Performance, Artifice, and Incongruity
Bruce E. Drushel

Chapter 7: “Excuse My Beauty!”: Camp Referencing and Memory Activation on RuPaul's Drag Race”
Carl Schottmiller

Part IV: Camp and Place

Chapter 8: Everything is Bigger in Texas: Camp and the Queerly Normal in Greater Tuna
Elizabeth M.

Product details

Published Feb 15 2017
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 1
ISBN 9781978772557
Imprint Lexington Books
Series Media, Culture, and the Arts
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

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This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

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Environment: Staging