Dance in Literature: A review of Weijie Ring’s monograph Tanz in der Literatur

At first glance, Weijie Ring’s monograph Tanz in der Literatur might appear to promise a philological survey of dance in literature between 1750 and 1850. From the opening pages, however, the book makes it clear that for Ring, dance is much more than a decorative motif or an occasional social scene. Dance, the author argues, constitutes one of the most sensitive cultural indicators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—an intermedial formation capable of registering, with particular precision, the subtle shifts that accompanied the emergence of modern European culture: new forms of social mobility, the reconfiguration of gender identities, transformations in the understanding of emotion, changes in body culture, and the loosening of boundaries between aesthetic forms. Drawing on the concept of the Sattelzeit, Ring approaches literature between 1750 and 1850 as if dance were a kind of “surface of sensibility” through which the period attempts to understand its own modernity.