A comprehensive guide to Richard Strauss's SALOME, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with German/English side-by side, and over 25 music highlight examples.

'Sisters of Salome' explores how four influential dancers embraced the persona of the femme fatale & transformed the misogynist image of a dangerously sexual woman into a form of personal liberation.

Great drama: Niether did John the Baptist have any idea that he would be decapatated over a woman's most hateful scorn just as Adam was destroyed by his beter half's sin. For the approaching seductive deed of that heartless niece of Herod was sure to fill up the long measure of her godless ways. Even Herod would soon discover that her selfish transgressions made the ugliness of her stone cold heart to be hid carefully under the outward beauty of her skin-deep sex appeal. Nor would he see her painted red fingernails as the claws they really were until after it was far too late. So it then came about the next evening, after the feast, that Herodius unexpectedly let Herod know that she had a surprise for him. Therefore she immediately clapped her hands as a signal for Salome to enter into that feasting hall, surrounded by a small multitude of guests, clad in scarlet and purple robes. And to Herod's delight that sultry young woman was all decked out beautifully with seven silk veils, all colors of the rainbow, one layered underneath the preceeding one. But she also knew in advance that she would only be removing four of her seven veils before she ended up her inticing performance, thereby taking Herod to the very edge of the abandonment of his better senses. It was then the seductive moment when that curvy fox began swaying to the dance of the seven veils with the mastery of a well seasoned seductrous. 'Twas additionally the subtle teasing moment of many beckoning twirls, the real flirtatious time of many winking whirls, as well as the R-rated hour of Salome's dress being removed one layer at a time with the expertise of a proffessional belly dancer, deep in the throes of stripping. And as she dipped, jumped, and did some mind blowing splits, Herod began drooling, while his ogling eyes stared at her in utter disbeilief.

While Oscar Wilde’s delightfully-witty comedies of manners receive the most fanfare from the general public and much of academia, Wilde’s most “serious” play—Salome—rightfully deserves an equal amount of attention. Written by emerging scholars, established scholars, and notable Wilde scholars at the top of the field, the far-ranging essays in this book—the first collection solely on Wilde’s Salome—provide new readings of the play, allowing us to better assess how and why Salome either fits or does not fit into Wilde’s oeuvre. Framed in a new light in this collection, this fuller understanding of Salome should potentially change the way we read both Salome and Wilde’s entire oeuvre.

'Sexual anarchy' - dire predictions, disasters, apocalypse - became the hallmark of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The New Woman and the Odd Woman threatened male identity and self-esteem; teh emergence of feminism and homosexuality meant the redefining of masculinity and femininity. This is the terrain which Elaine Showalter explores with such consummate originality and wit. Looking at parallels between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries and their representations in literature, art and film, she ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture - from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies (Heart of Darkness reworked into Apocalypse Now), Freud to Fatal Attraction - all are part of this scholarly and entertaining study of the fin de siecle.

This first full-length study of Salome in English since Lawrence Gilman's (1907) moves from historical and literary analysis to critical appraisal and includes a synopsis, bibliography and discography.

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?