Gendering bodies/performing art: dance and literature in early twentieth-century British culture

Abstract

Gendering Bodies / Performing Art is the first book that attempts a conceptual integration of dance and literary history in British culture. It attempts to make visible the role of dance in creating, reinforcing, and challenging developments in aesthetic practice and ideology in which both dance and literature participated. Koritz integrates chapters on dance and dancers- from music hall ballet girls of the 1890s to the prestigious season of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet- with discussions on how major literary figures such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and T.S. Eliot used dance to further their own aesthetic agendas. In doing so, she provides an illuminating analysis of the connections between literature and dance, and explores the ways in which these two arts actively engaged in cultural processes encompassing both. . . provocative and stimulating . . . an invaluable addition to the work that is already available on turn-of-century theater/culture. . . .--Vivien Gardner, Manchester University Reaching between the poles of popular music hall and the Ballet Russe, Koritz addresses a series of interrelated, mutually informing discourses in which we overhear the language of the literary community in its accolades and in its outcries. Koritz's book will prove useful to a wide variety of readers; many scholars of English literature will undoubtedly use this book to the fullest, turning to it again and again as a contextual primer for performance issues in their field.--Cheryl Herr, University of IowaAmy Koritz is Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Program and Assistant Professor of English, Tulane University.

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