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Jane Ellen Harrison and a Ritual Aesthetic: The Early 20th Century Turn Towards Materiality, Embodiment and Performativity in the Arts


 This article considers the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s ritual theory of art as part of an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic zeitgeist occurring at the beginning of the 20th century. While centred on ancient Greek culture and art, Harrison’s work is directly connected to her concerns with religion and art in her own time. Her theory posits ritual as the forgotten origin of art and theology and sees in the modern period a return to this source in both religion and art. I argue that her theory implies a particular aesthetic which speaks to key shifts happening concurrently across the arts in Europe and America, and that the scope of her theory, incorporating insights from a range of fields of study, makes it a useful and unique lens through which to contextualise and view important developments in the arts during this period. Leading examples of these developments are considered from the fields of visual art, literature, theatre and particularly dance.