From the Publisher
A review from CHOICE Magazine, July/August 1998"No era has done more to define the image and essence of ballet than the Romantic decades of the 1830s and 1840s," claims Garafola. Here she has gathered essays by a group of excellent international scholars, who illustrate the importance of the Romantic ballet in the context of Western theatrical dancing. This reviewer has seen nothing in print with this book's depth of scholarship and diversity of viewpoints. The essays also cut through many of the myths of the era and represent the Romantic ballet as a flourishing international movement. The book discusses thoroughly how the earliest surviving ballets (La Sylphide, Giselle, etc.) came to be, highlights aspects of the Romantic ballet previously unexplored, such as its use and creation of national dance forms, its construction of an exotic-erotic hierarchy, and the repercussions of its feminizaton as an art form. In her essay "Feminism or Fatishism?" Joellen A. Meglin offers an especially intriguing! look at feminism in France in the 1830s and its relationship to the ballet La Revolte des femmes, choreographed by Filippo Taglioni as a vehicle for his daughter Marie. The book contains numerous illustrations and much archival material, some of it translated into English for the first time. The dance world will be indebted to Garafola for this marvelous collection. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. --L.K. Rosenberg, Miami University
