Loie Fuller was the most famous American in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, impresario, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Fuller befriended royalty and inspired artists such as Mallarmé, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Today, though, she is remembered mainly as an untutored "pioneer" of modern dance and stage technology, the "electricity fairy" who created a sensation onstage whirling under colored spotlights. But in Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome, Fuller finally receives her due as a major artist whose work helped lay a foundation for all modernist performance to come. The book demonstrates that Fuller was not a mere entertainer or precursor, but an artist of great psychological, emotional, and sexual expressiveness whose work illuminates the centrality of dance to modernism. Electric Salome places Fuller in the context of classical and modern ballet, Art Nouveau, Orientalism, surrealism, the birth of cinema, American modern dance, and European drama. It offers detailed close readings of texts and performances, situated within broader historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks. Accessibly written, the book also recounts the human story of how an obscure, uneducated woman from the dustbowl of the American Midwest moved to Paris, became a star, and lived openly for decades as a lesbian.

Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salom has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salom as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salom marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salom are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarm , Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.

We are not even sure of her name: it might have been Salome; it might have been Herodias, like that of her mother. She appears very briefly in only two Gospels of the New Testament, to dance at the birthday party of her mother’s husband, Herod, the ruler of Galilee. We do not even know what kind of dance it was, but we are told that it pleased him so much he promised to give her anything she asked for. What she asked for was the head of the prophet John the Baptist on a platter. Although she disappeared from the pages of the New Testament, Salome and her dance have puzzled, intrigued, and dominated the imaginations of artists and writers for two millennia. Was she just a little girl doing a dance performance to please her stepfather and his guests? Was she a nubile teenager bent on seduction? Was she a femme fatale who aimed at the death of a man she could not possess? The Salome Project is the result of a quest to answer these questions and find the real Salome.

Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity investigates the intersection of film theory and nineteenth-century literature, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era aims to replicate an illusion of life and its sensations, in ways directly related to broader transitions into our modern cinematic age. A key part of this evolution in representation relies on the continual re-emergence of the artificial woman as longstanding expression of masculine artistic subjectivity, which, by the later nineteenth century, becomes a photographic and filmic drive. Moving through the beginning of film history, from Georges Méliès and other “silent” filmmakers in the 1890s, into more contemporary movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the book analyzes how films are often structured around the prior century’s mythic and literary principles, which now serve as foundation for film as medium—a phantom form for life’s re-presentation. Artificial Generation provides a crucial reassessment of the longstanding, mutual exchange between cinematic and literary reproduction, offering an innovative perspective on the proto-cinematic imperative of simulation within nineteenth-century literary symbolism.

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The purpose of MATC is to unite people and organizations in their region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre.

Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife. As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.

Celebrity personalities, who reign over much of our cultural landscape, owe their fame not to specific deeds but to the ability to project a distinct personal image, to create an icon of the self. Rising Star is a fascinating look at the roots of this particular form of celebrity. Here Rhonda Garelick locates a prototype of the star personality in the dandies and aesthete literary figures of the nineteenth century, including Beau Brummell, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Oscar Wilde, and explores their peculiarly charged relationship with women and performance. When fin-de-siècle aesthetes turned their attention to the new, "feminized" spectacle of mass culture, Garelick argues, they found a disturbing female counterpart to their own highly staged personae. She examines the concept of the broadcasted self-image in literary works as well as in such unwritten cultural texts as the choreography and films of dancer Loie Fuller, the industrialized spectacles of European World Fairs, and the cultural performances taking place today in fields ranging from entertainment to the academy. Recent dandy-like figures such as the artist formerly known as Prince, Madonna, Jacques Derrida, and Jackie O. all share a legacy provided by the encounter between "high" and early mass culture. Garelick's analysis of this encounter covers a wide range of topics, from the gender complexity of the European male dandy and the mechanization of the female body to Orientalist performance, the origins of cinema, and the emergence of "crowd" theory and mass politics.