While cultural and historical links between the two eras are long-established, Armond’s investigation sets itself apart by expanding the baroque’s circle of belated influence to include English and American works, while rooting her comparison in the generative possibilities of the baroque’s “sense of theatre as an art-form that was applied to a whole constellation of social, political, technical, and aesthetic roles” (7). Isadora Duncan’s theories of dance prompt a consideration of movement and form in Spinoza’s Ethics as well as its reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century evolutionary theory. In Armond’s words, “Nightwood’s significance as a modern, secular counterpart of the baroque Trauerspiel can . . . be said to evolve from Barnes’s awareness of the fate of Jews in Europe, their forfeited state of integration and opportunity, and her sense of the similarities between baroque and contemporary post-war history” (81).