ABSTRACT
Classical ballet is a virtuoso form of highly cultivated physical expression that rests on the control and stylisation of the natural body.1 Surpassing physical limits in stunningly beautiful movements, it represents human dreams of freedom and transcendence, achieved through a relentless regime of bodily knowledge and discipline. In this book, it serves as a backdrop to the dance performances which are created in the literary texts, and shows how some of the literary topics have been transposed to the stage. It offers a matrix of formalisations of the body and its comportment, producing physical images of the ideal subject that casts its shadow on the less ideal protagonists of the writings. It is a form of dance that hardly enters the literary texts at all. However, ballet is part of an aesthetic tradition against which the literary authors form their own narratives. As a cultural practice that became a profession at the end of the seventeenth century, was refined over the course of the eighteenth century and codified at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is deeply embedded in the neoclassicist discourse on the body.
