Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War - Softcover

Dickinson, Edward Ross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1316647218 ISBN 13: 9781316647219

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

This is a remarkable account of the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European cultural life in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis, sufficiently ubiquitous and high-profile to spark media storms, parliamentary debates, and exasperated denunciations even from progressive art critics. He shows how modern dance spoke in multiple registers - as religious and as scientific; as redemptively chaste and scandalously sensual; as elitist and popular. He reveals the connections between modern dance and changing gender relations and family dynamics, imperialism, racism, and cultural exchanges with the wider non-European world, and new conceptions of selfhood. Ultimately the book finds in these complex and often contradictory connections a new way of understanding the power of modernism and modernity and their capacity to revolutionize and transform the modern world in the momentous, creative, violent middle decades of the twentieth century.

About this title

Review

'Edward Ross Dickinson brilliantly demonstrates that aesthetic modernism danced a neat double-two-step in the early decades of the twentieth century, combining the tense oppositions of global modernity into a harmonious new language. With its nimble prose and adroit research, Dancing in the Blood is itself a delightfully artful and informative cultural history.' Michael Saler, University of California, Davis

'Dancing in the Blood makes a major new contribution to the scholarship of early twentieth-century dance. Edward Ross Dickinson brings a fresh historical perspective to dance and asks us to reconsider the formative early years of modern dance with new readings of modernism and modernity. An exhilarating read.' Michael Huxley, De Montfort University

Book Description

The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1316647218
• ISBN 13: 9781316647219
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308