Deconstructed Divas

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In Deconstructed Divas, Marcus R. Pyle looks to the femme fatale as a trope of artistic production and social culture during the turn of the twentieth century. The femme fatale—the hypersexual, mysterious, magnetic, and “dangerous” woman—was the enemy of the fin de sicle. Ultimately, she functions as a trope who is a catalyst that contributed to the erosion and fracture of musical form that characterized the modernist period. It is the trope itself, endowed with certain qualities of subjectivity, that leads to innovations of musical form and to the transcontinental exchange of the femme fatale—from French and German opera to Harlem Renaissance vaudeville performances. In essence, this book is an exploration of the tensions between stereotype and self-definition.</jats:p>