Introduction to Laura Marcus, Rhythm: The Measure of the Modern

This Introduction to Laura Marcus's final monumental but unfinished work describes her wholly new understanding of the central importance of rhythm across the arts and sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The turn to rhythm was formative in many fields and comprehended poetry, music, dance, sculpture, painting, photography, film, gymnastics, physics, education, psychology, physiology, thinking about race, class and gender, the past and the future, tradition and change. From wave theory to orthography rhythm shaped creative thought. We summarise the existing six chapters out of what were to be eight. 1. The discourses of wave theory. 2. Rhythm in modernity – aesthetics and science. 3. Dance theories of Steiner and Dalcroze – social and physiological. 4. Rhythm theory in modernist avant-garde periodicals. 5. The Bloomsbury Group, Frye and Woolf. 6. The cultural and political turn to native American rhythm.