Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performan) by Megan Girdwood (Paperback)

About the Book

An account of Salome's dance and its centrality within modernist performance

Book Synopsis

This book explores Salome's quintessential veiled dance through readings of fictional and poetic texts, dramatic productions, dance performances and silent films, arguing for the central place of this dancer - and her many interpreters - to the wider formal and aesthetic contours of modernism.
Loïe Fuller, Maud Allan, Oscar Wilde, Ida Rubinstein, Alla Nazimova, Djuna Barnes, Germaine Dulac, Edward Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, Ninette de Valois and Samuel Beckett are foregrounded for their innovative engagements with this paradigmatic fin-de-siècle myth, showing how the ephemeral stuff of dance became a constitutive element of the modernist imagination during this period.

From the Back Cover

An account of Salome's dance and its centrality within modernist performance This book explores Salome's quintessential veiled dance through readings of fictional and poetic texts, dramatic productions, dance performances and silent films, arguing for the central place of this dancer - and her many interpreters - to the wider formal and aesthetic contours of modernism. Loïe Fuller, Maud Allan, Oscar Wilde, Ida Rubinstein, Alla Nazimova, Djuna Barnes, Germaine Dulac, Edward Gordon Craig, W. B. Yeats, Ninette de Valois and Samuel Beckett are foregrounded for their innovative engagements with this paradigmatic fin-de-siècle myth, showing how the ephemeral stuff of dance became a constitutive element of the modernist imagination during this period. Megan Girdwood is an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.

Review Quotes

This insightful study places Salomé at the centre of modernist considerations of dance. Exploring a diverse array of contexts beginning with the fin de siècle, Girdwood captures the way in which the veiled figure of Salomé has engendered multiple meanings through representations of the moving body in twentieth-century writing.--Susan Jones, University of Oxford

About the Author

Megan Girdwood is Assistant Professor in Modern Literature, 1870-1945 at Durham University. She has published work in journals including Modernist Cultures, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Irish Studies Review, and The Cambridge Quarterly. Her monograph, Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination, is shortlisted for the MSA First Book Prize 2022.