Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1919–25) are pivotal works in the composer's relatively small œuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration, his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and the centrality of language and literature in his compositional practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of French music.

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.

Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."

By the end of the nineteenth century, women had become an undeniable force both in the public discussion of social life and in politics itself. Yet in art and literature women's bodies continued to be represented—and domesticated—by men. They were still more often the object of the artist's or writer's gaze than they were the subject of their own representing processes. The erotic potential of women's bodies, however, was far from a marginal concern in the elaboration of modern forms of politics, art, literature, and psychology. In Eroticism and the Body Politic, scholars from art history, history, and literature examine the frequent intersections between the body erotic and the body politic. Focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, they show how eroticized representations of bodies had a multitude of political and cultural meanings. The authors consider the eroticized body in a wide variety of media: from Fragonard's paintings of "erotic mothers," to political pornography attacking Marie Antoinette, to the "new woman" of fin de siècle decorative arts. Exploring the possibilities of a multidisiplinary approach, the volume shows that eroticism had an impact far beyond the usual confines of libertine or pornographic literature—and that politics included much more than voting, meeting, or demonstrating. At a time of general methodological ferment in the "human sciences," Eroticism and the Body Politic brings fresh approaches to the developing field of cultural studies.

Selected writings illuminate a century of international dance.