During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Salome rose from a minor biblical character to a cultural icon famous for a striptease known as the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” With the help of author Oscar Wilde and opera composer Richard Strauss, the reimagined story of Salome managed to captivate a wide audience and empower women, both socially and sexually. This book presents over 130 historical photographs, the largest compilation of such images yet produced. Mata Hari, Ruth St. Denis, Anita Berber, Alla Nazimova, and Gloria Swanson are among those pictured. The pictures illustrate how performers across different art forms, including opera, theater, burlesque, modern dance, and early motion pictures, presented Salome as a sensual woman driven by lust and madness to destroy the man she loves.

Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salom 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 Salom as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salom 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 Salom are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarm , 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.

Although the root of the Hebrew name “Salome” is “peaceful”, the image spawned by the most famous woman to carry that name has been anything but peaceful. She and her story have long been linked to the beheading of John the Baptist, as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, since Salome was the supposed catalyst for the prophet’s execution. This history of the myth of Salome describes the process by which that myth was created, the roles that art, literature, theology and music played in that creation, and how Salome’s image as evil varied from one period to another according to the prevailing cultural myths surrounding women. After setting forth the Biblical and historical origins of the Salome story, the book examines the major cultural, literary and artistic works which developed and propagated it, including those by Filippo Lippi, Rogier van der Weyden, Titian, Moreau, Beardsley, Mallarmé, Wilde and Richard Strauss.

Lord Alfred Douglas' translation of Wilde's great play — originally written in French — with all well-known Beardsley illustrations, including suppressed plates. Features 28 Beardsley illustrations and an introduction by Robert Ross.