The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature

The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature: Narratives of Sexuality and Power traces the evolution of the waltz from a taboo dance in the early nineteenth century to a gracefully nostalgic practice that must be preserved by the century's end.While Sabrina Gilchrist Hadyk references eighteenth-century authors to frame the waltz's initial reception in England, the study focuses primarily on Victorian authors who shaped how and why this dance was paradoxically viewed as elegant, effeminate, and sterile.Hadyk explores female sexuality and the concept of choice in the ballroom; a shifting and sometimes contradictory understanding of masculinity through male performance; the erasure of and reclamation of queer desire in heterosexual courting spaces; and the rhetoric of new technologies that attempted to contain, shape, and memorialize a temporal art form.A brief epilogue considers how late-Victorian (and heavily sanitized and romanticized) depictions of the waltz reverberate today in popular