A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, "Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices" offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.

This book presents an innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism. Dee Reynolds brings this approach to bear on works by Rimbaud, Mallarme, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. It allows her to redefine the relationship between Symbolism and abstract art, and to contribute new methodological perspectives to comparative studies of poetry and painting. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a crucial period in the emergence of new modes of representation, and is currently at the forefront of critical enquiry. This is the first book to examine Symbolism and abstraction in this way, and the first to treat these poets and painters together. It is an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, literary history, and comparative aesthetics.

Dance is a uniquely significant art form, whose primary material is not simply the 'body', but energy as it is used and experienced in movement. Energy is central to discourses of modernity and modernism, in which choreographers and dancers can actively intervene through their innovative uses of energy. Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham are key choreographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose rhythmic innovations challenged established norms of energy usage in their socio-cultural contexts, enabling their contemporaries to engage differently with dominant economies of energy. This book explores their rhythmic innovations by combining discussion of cultural contexts with close analysis of specific dance works. Uses of energy in dance are described and analysed with the aid of concepts drawn from Rudolf Laban's writings, and are theorized with reference to historical, social and cultural contexts and to phenomenological and post-structuralist approaches to the embodied subject, constructing the argument that choreographical innovation - including recent work using digital technologies - involves a process of 'kinesthetic imagination'.