Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
January 2019
Journal
The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts
First Page
214
Last Page
228
Abstract
This essay traces the longevity of the Danse macabre as a Gothic trope beginning in the Middle Ages and coming to define a key aesthetic element of the Gothic from the late Eighteenth Century to the present. One of my key concerns is the dancing skeleton as brought to us by Holbein and then transformed in the ballet blanc of Romanticism, through the grotesque of the Modern, and into the postmodern parodic. Central texts are Giselle, Cocteau's The Young Man and Death, and Fosse's All That Jazz.