Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression
A study of Oscar Wilde's ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© in modernist and postmodernist literature and culture.
Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of ³§²¹±ô´Ç³¾Ã© in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.