Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salomé 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 Salomé as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salomé 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 Salomé 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 Salomé 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.
"Salome's Modernity is a first-class piece of scholarship—at once learned, sharply focused, and beautifully, indeed, entertainingly written. Above all, it is a significant contribution to modernist studies, for it takes a number of themes that appear in the various writings about Salome to show precisely how the various authors, performers and film-makers utilized and rethought these themes for their own times."
—Herbert S. Lindenberger, Stanford University
"Salome's Modernity is intellectually powerful, truly informative, and engagingly written. No other book rivals it in scope when it comes to placing Wilde's play in a cultural and literary genealogy that links memorable works of poetry, fiction, drama, opera, and film."
—Joseph Bristow, UCLA
Cover illustration: Maria Ewing in Richard Strauss’s Salome, Pittsburgh Opera, 2001, © Suellen Fitzsimmons. Cover design: Heidi Hobde Dailey
