In Body Ascendant, Harold Segel shows how obsession with physical culture resonated widely through the modernist movement and traces its profound influence on the arts in the early twentieth century. Segel examines the emergence of modern dance and its impact on virtually all the other arts. He describes the shift from speech to gesture in modern drama and the revival of serious artistic interest in pantomime. And he shows how bold attempts to revitalize literary language paralleled a new emphasis on the direct experience of the writer.Characterizing the modernist man of letters as a self-styled man of action, Segel reviews the careers of such writers as Gabriele D'Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Nikolai Gumilyov, Ernst Junger, Ernest Hemingway, Henry de Montherlant, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He offers a broad overview of the various manifestations of the modernist preoccupation with physicality, including the disparagement of Christianity and Judaism for their focus on spiritual life. He clearly establishes the disturbing compatibility between the era's artistic and athletic celebration of body and the eventual rise of totalitarian nationalism and racism. The dark side of the Nazi emphasis on physical perfection as essential to ideal Germanness, Segel notes, was the consistent portrayal of the Jew as physically and racially inferior.