Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain

Zimring argues that "social dancing captured the modernist imagination because it embodied such stark and powerful contradictions in a society whose search for meaning and consolation had intensified at a time of highly conspicuous changes in everyday life in which people flocked together to participate in collective practices that seemed simultaneously ancient and futuristic." [...]her book takes into consideration not only the rage for the Charleston, but also the popularity of folk-dancing. [...]in Women in Love, he seems in opposition to dangers posed by the mechanized reactions of groups. Zimring suggests that for Lawrence, "dance underscores the endurance and unassailable centrality of the heterosexual couple in the renewal of society." [...]he "rejects the social gathering of dancers in combinations much larger than two."