Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination

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.

• List of Illustrations Abbreviations AcknowledgementsIntroduction 1. Unlocatable Bodies: Modernist Veiled Dancers from Loïe Fuller to Maud Allan2. ‘That Invisible Dance’: Symbolism, Salomé and Oscar Wilde’s Choreographic Aesthetics3. ‘Harmonies of Light’: Ciné-Dances and Women’s Silent Film4. ‘Herodias’ Daughters Have Returned Again’: W. B. Yeats and the Ideal Body5. Epilogue: ‘Danced through its Seven Phases’: Samuel Beckett and the Late Modernist SalomeBibliographyIndex

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.