Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin, 1933. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-61).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-70).

"Virtual Motion” asks how early modern literature may be apprehended as a choreographic medium. It explores the relationship between literature and dance across plays, poems, ballads, and political and religious treatises, in order to show that dance manifests to different ends in each. It treats dance as aesthetic patterns of movement that span a range of virtual and actual spaces, from the imagination of readers to specific material and textual phenomena, which include the human body most consequentially, but also scripts and libretti, moving scenery, engravings, and manuscript miscellanies. It argues that as dance circulates between such media, it helps to emblematize broad forms of social upheaval characterized by motional effects, for example the migration of people and the spread of religious beliefs. Its four chapters study four such social upheavals. The first chapter studies theological controversies that arose during the Reformation, and argues that the graceful dancing body became implicated in theories concerning the circulation of spiritual grace between divine and mortal bodies. In points to the ambiguous place of the body in the writings of John Calvin and Baldassare Castiglione, and argues that William Shakespeare drew on dance theory in order to grant women a specifically choreographic form of devotional authority. The second chapter demonstrates that the classical interests of prominent humanist scholars, especially Julius Caesar Scaliger, included reviving the dances of antiquity. It traces the influence of such scholarship on two productions that sought to revive satyr dances as a form of embodied satire: Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, and an anonymous Jesuit play staged at the English College in Rome, Captiva Religio. The third chapter argues that literature used New World “Indian” dance as a means of theorizing the tensions of colonial ventures both past and present, and traces Indian dance across several media: a single engraving altered to produce new kinetic effects as it was reused by multiple travelogues, the scenery and bodies in William Davenant’s “history ballet” about the Spanish colonization of Peru, and the ballads that Aphra Behn drew upon to stage the collision of Scottish and Indian dance in Virginia. The fourth chapter examines how English country dance, as both a physical practice and a political metaphor, circulated between actual households and those depicted in plays, for example through manuscript miscellanies like that maintained at Monkland manor in Herefordshire. It studies country dances that occurred in performances devised by Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Henry Purcell, and Thomas Betterton, in order to argue that this genre played an underappreciated role in cultivating political identities across some of England’s most turbulent decades.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (January 22, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-51)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on August 6, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-121).

Many Australian novelists since the late 1890s have written about dance in varied and interesting ways. Characters in many Australian novels are portrayed dancing on stage, dancing within the context of their everyday lives, watching corroborees, reminiscing about social dance events in distant homelands or gyrating under flashing lights at discos and raves. In other instances the word “dance” (or an associated term) is used metaphorically to convey actual or imagined movement such as the wind dancing in trees, or thoughts dancing in characters’ minds. Although representations of dance in Australian novels portray qualities such as vitality, beauty and transcendence, this thesis argues that they also elucidate a shadowland of pain and suffering and sometimes an uncertainty about Australian culture and identity. Indigenous dancers are scrutinised critically by non-Indigenous spectators. Despite the bright lights and glamour of their world, professional dancers are shown to struggle against the persistence of the cultural cringe. Unflattering notions of class and gender taint the excitement and romance of social dance occasions, migrant characters associate dance with painful memories of abandoned homelands and dancers performing professionally or privately risk being labelled mad, feminine or homosexual (or all three). The metaphorical use of the word dance does not always portray vital movement but often conveys heaviness, awkwardness and even imminent collapse. Descriptions of dance are minimalist to the point where the dance almost disappears from the reader’s view. As well as making dance in Australian novels visible, the investigation conducted in this thesis sharpens awareness of its negative or “shadow” side and challenges the widespread critical glorification of the presence of dance in literature more generally. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2008. / A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Communication Arts, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-332). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.