Overview

This collection challenges the dominant understandings of 18th-century sociability by placing dance, and the training and movement of the body, at its core. Rather than thinking of dance and music as peripheral ornaments to the complex business of Enlightenment society, it highlights them as important vehicles for the development and dissemination of the ideas and practices that shaped people’s social, emotional and intellectual worlds. Exploring the relationship between dance and sociability, and the development of both through the long 18th century, chapters in this collection span different practices in England, Scotland, colonial America, the West Indies, Germany, the Low Countries and Norway. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, they argue that dance, which was entangled with concerns about touch, dress and bodies, was integral to the ways in which ‘enlightened sociability’ was understood, performed and accepted.

Full Product Details

9781350498921

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Reviews

“Any reader of eighteenth-century novels, especially the works of Jane Austen, will know that dancing was an important aspect of social life in the age of Enlightenment. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of dance as a popular form of sociability at every level of the social order; this book offers a detailed study of early modern dance that will appeal to scholars and dancers alike. It is odd that dance hasn’t figured as prominently as it should in early modern social history. This book offers a step in the right direction.” * Brian Cowan, McGill University, Canada *

Author Information

Hillary Burlock is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Ian Newman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, USA, and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Mark Philp is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick, UK, and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, University of Oxford, UK.

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