Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination

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.