The Construction of the Evil Clown in Stephen King's It

This book deals with the postmodern figure of the Evil Clown, placing it in the context of literary history and cultural theory before subjecting it to analysis. This book provides a general definition of the clown, before tracing the cultural history of this ambivalent figure from its starting point in Greek mythology through the Middle Ages to the circus clown. In addition, it provides a separate definition of the Evil Clown as a subcategory in its own right. The thesis devotes an extensive chapter to the complex theories from cultural aesthetics and psychoanalysis which are crucial to understanding and describing the core functional modes of the Evil Clown: the Gothic, the Grotesque and the Uncanny. The book makes full use of these theories in the course of its textual analysis and concludes with a persuasive conclusion and a comprehensive bibliography.