Megan Girdwood – författare

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.

An account of Salome's dance and its centrality within modernist performanceOffers a new account of the Salome myth that underlines its centrality to modernist performance across different genres and forms, including drama, dance, and silent filmDraws on interdisciplinary methodologies from literary and performance studies to illustrate the importance of dance to modernist writing about Salome, providing a set of both conceptual and historical co-ordinates within modernism more broadlyBuilds a conceptual framework drawing on the writings of Aby Warburg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Ranci re in order to analyse key 'scenes' and sites of performance in the genealogy of this particular choreographic themeEngages in fresh readings of plays by canonical playwrights Wilde, Yeats, Beckett alongside the work of lesser-known performers and filmmakers in order to destabilise the gendered and aesthetic hierarchies often germane to literary histories of the periodThis 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.Lo e 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-si cle myth, showing how the ephemeral stuff of dance became a constitutive element of the modernist imagination during this period.

This collection of essays explores the life and works of the British poet and author of short stories Charlotte Mew (1869-1928). It represents the first volume dedicated solely to critical engagement with the full range of Mew’s poetry, fiction and essays. Mew moved within a remarkable range of literary and intellectual circles, from The Yellow Book in the 1890s to Bloomsbury’s Poetry Bookshop in the 1910s. As such, her work challenges traditional distinctions between literary periods and sits within the more expansive framework of the long nineteenth century and its legacies. Each chapter contextualises Mew’s oeuvre by examining her experiments with poetic and narrative genres in relation to her wider late Victorian and early modernist intellectual milieu. The volume draws together literary scholars working across the fields of poetry and poetics, decadence, modernism, ecocriticism and queer theory, while illustrating the particular stylistic and thematic complexities of Mew’s writing.