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.