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Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (2011) is a book by Petra Dierkes-Thrun.

Abstract

"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 Salome 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."--Publisher's description

Editions

Published in Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Contents

• Introduction
• Dancing on the threshold: Wilde's Salome between symbolist, decadent, and modernist aesthetics
• "The brutal music and the delicate text"? Richard Strauss's operatic modernism in Salome
• Perverts in court: Maud Allan's the vision of Salome and the Pemberton-Billing trial
• Alla Nazimova's Salome: an historical phantasy by Oscar Wilde
• Portraits of the artist as a gay man and Salome as a feminist icon: Wilde and Salome in popular culture since the 1980s.

External links

• [ Google Books]