| This dissertation argues for the importance of dance in Restoration and eighteenth-century writings as a powerful signification for the human body and its relation to larger, collective bodies. Chapter One explores literature of the early modern period in which dance serves as a stable trope of social cohesion, evoking the universal correspondence between human and cosmic motions. It looks specifically at English commentators, who, more than their Continental counterparts, stress dance's social utility. Chapter Two argues that as the seventeenth century ends dance becomes a trope of negotiation between individual desires and increasingly uncertain social conventions. In John Locke's educational writings, for instance, dancing balances the utility of habit with the values of autonomous individuality in the upbringing of young gentlemen, and mediates the threat posed to them by the increasing emphasis on gender difference. In the early periodicals, discussions of dancing suggest that polishing one's manners makes sociability pleasurable, yet they also instruct readers how to distinguish between admirable self-improvement and questionable self-advancement. Chapter Three focuses on eighteenth-century texts in which dance informs issues of social and gender status. It begins by exploring representations of the solitary dancing woman that allude to the threatening figure of Salome. The dance of the eponymous heroine in Daniel Defoe's Roxana, for instance, in representing the rhetorical power of this figure, appeals to readers' anxieties about the mutability of status and gender roles. The chapter ends by reading Edward Chicken's poem The Collier's Wedding , which represents dance as an expression of the authentic heteronormative exuberance of the working poor in protoindustrial northern England. Chapter Four compares mid- and later-century attempts to "aestheticize" dancing, beginning with Scottish Enlightenment deliberations over dance as a "fine" art or a transitional stage in the "progress" of literature, the arts, and civilization itself, then moving to the arguments of William Hogarth that assert the female form as the exemplar of beauty. Through a dual feminization of dance, which emphasizes the feminine qualities of the female dancer and the effeminacy of the dancing master---Hogarth presents the dancing body as an object of both sensual pleasure and disinterested contemplation. |
