Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers story lines of Romantic ballets as well as popular and artistic representations of women dancers as dramatizations of nineteenth-century constructions of female sexuality and male class identity. It looks at the works of visual and literary artists Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Emil Zola (1840-1902), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), and J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907) and how they reconfigure the narratives of the dancer in ways that both reify and subvert the representational regulation of the dancer's body. The book elaborates the ways in which Symbolist writers, early modern dancers, women writers, and avant-garde choreographers and filmmakers reinterpret the danseuse in Modernist media. It situates those aesthetics firmly within the culturally specific gender configurations of the late nineteenth century.