Description: The Pointe of the Pen argues that the nineteenth century's balletic innovations the most iconic of which was the ballerina en pointe, or dancing on the tips of her toes - assisted nineteenth-century poets in both conceiving and articulating the object of verse in an age increasingly shaped by the novel.
Brief description: Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.
Review Quotes:
'[Tontiplaphol] offers an extended close reading of ballet's influence in the nineteenth-century novel, (as well as poetry), and persuasively argues that literary historians have missed seeing how it "relies rhetorically and structurally on nineteenth-century ballet's evolving aesthetic and significance." [...] Ballet had a considerable influence on American as well as English poetry of the nineteenth century, and Tontiplaphol's book deftly demonstrates how we might begin to see and study it.' Jessica L. Jessee, Review 19