Modernism and the Choreographic Imagination: Salome’s Dance After 1890

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 English at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles and reviews in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Irish Studies Review and The Cambridge Quarterly, and won the British Association for Modernist Studies Essay Prize 2020 for an article on Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten, forthcoming in Modernist Cultures.