ABSTRACT
Representations of dancing and dancers in the later decades of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, both theatrical and recreational, produced dance as an important element in the formation and classification of English identity and of an emergent bourgeois ruling class in post-Enlightenment England. Balanced uneasily between order and chaos, between licit and illicit sexuality, ritual and abandon, public display and private intimacy, high culture and low, the professionalism of the stage and the amateurism of the evening party, dance was an unstable but extremely useful signifier in the Romantic imagination, and an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in British print culture.
