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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.
Taking its cue from Baudelaire's important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds--both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual--which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space a...
This text analyzes the legal, social and literary impact of lesbian scandal on early twentieth-century British and Anglo-American culture.
Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot’s famous attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction – a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows. The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the...
With its first public live performance in Paris on 11 February 1896, Oscar Wilde's Salomé took on female embodied form that signalled the start of 'her' phenomenal journey through the history of the arts in the twentieth century. This volume explores Salome's appropriation and reincarnation across the arts - not just Wilde's heroine, nor Richard Strauss's - but Salome as a cultural icon in fin-de-siècle society, whose appeal for ever new interpretations of the biblical story still endures today. Using Salome as a common starting point, each chapter suggests new ways in which performing bodies reveal alternative stories, narratives and perspectives and offer a range and breadth of source ma...
The Poor Bugger's Tool--the title taking its name from the veiled reference to Roger Casement in Joyce's Ulysses--draws on writings by Wilde, Synge, Joyce, Jamie O'Neill, and Patrick McCabe to consider how each deploys queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation and put forward anti-imperialist critiques.
This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life, and is truly innovative in examining the Fin de Siècle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe. Thematic topics covered include new concepts of time and space, globalizat...
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but al...
Queer Insists is a memorial essay, a work of mourning, written for the queer theorist and performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) shortly after his untimely death in December 2013. In a series of fragments, not unlike Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Michael O'Rourke shares memories of Muñoz, the stories and reflections of his friends in the wake of his passing, and readings of his work from Disidentifications to Cruising Utopia and beyond. O'Rourke argues that, for Muñoz, queer does not exist, per se, but rather insists, soliciting us from the future to-come. Muñoz reached towards teleopoietic worlds as he invented a queer theory we have yet to find, but are invited to glimp...
Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.