When the prophet Jokanaan is brought to the attention of the princess Salomé, he rebukes her interest, which causes her to make a brutal declaration.Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy explores the repercussions of her horrifying decision. Originally composed in French in 1892, Salomé is a controversial tale full of cruelty and retribution. Wilde expands on the Biblical story of John the Baptist, whom was captured and beheaded by Herod Antipas. It explores the interaction between the characters showing Salomé’s spiteful nature and Herod’s growing concern. It’s a bold adaptation of a somber tale that leaves a mark on all who read it. Salomé’s one-act story structure immediately dives into the strange dynamic amongst Herod and his family. Once Salomé’s bloodlust is apparent Herod’s forced to reconcile both of their futures. It’s a haunting drama that’s amplified by its Biblical setting and notable characters. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Salomé is both modern and readable.

This volume presents for the first time the complete textual history of one of the most famous love letters ever written. Addressed to Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and composed in Reading Gaol, it was later given the title 'De Profundis' by Wilde's friend and literary executor, RobertRoss. It was Ross's severely abridged and sanitized version, published in 1905 and again 1908, which inaugurated the tradition of seeing De Profundis as the apologia pro sua vita of a broken man. This edition takes account of this complex heritage by arguing that Wilde's prison document may be seennot just as the basis of a letter (a typed copy of which may have been sent to Douglas) but also as an unfinished literary work which he intended for public consumption at some future date. Such a case is made by placing in the public domain, often for the first time, a number of different works,derived from different texts, each of which bears witness to Wilde's multiple intentions for his prison document. These texts comprise: the manuscript held in the British Library; the version of Wilde's letter published by his son, Vyvyan Holland, from a typescript bequeathed to him by Robert Ross;hitherto unpublished witnesses to that typescript; and Ross's editions, collated with each other. The commentary to this edition - again for the first time - sets Wilde's story of his own life in 'De Profundis' against the testimony of other players in his drama, including, most importantly, that ofDouglas. In so doing it exposes the partial nature of Wilde's narrative, as well as the personal obsessions which animated it. The commentary also demonstrates a hitherto unnoticed element of Wilde's work, the extent and nature of its richly layered intertextuality and its similarity, in itscompositional practices, to many of his earlier works.

In Oscar Wilde's Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore Wilde's fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that Wilde's substantial “Chatterton” notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of Wilde's career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,”The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources,Oscar Wilde's Chatterton explains why, in Wilde's personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.

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.

The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry

A beautiful and informative gift book devoted to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, one of the defining artists of the Art Nouveau style. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) was only twenty-five when he died from tuberculosis, but in his short life he established a reputation as one of the most accomplished—and controversial—illustrators of his day. Astonishingly, all his work was created in the course of only six years, yet his contribution to the visual language of Art Nouveau was profound; today, his work is instantly recognizable for its use of black ink and flowing lines on white paper, along with its erotically charged subject matter. Not all his work was sexually provocative—much was satirical, attacking the decadent mores of the time—but some was and remains shocking, taking its stylistic inspiration from Japanese shunga and Greek vase painting and its thematic inspiration from mythology, history, poetry, and drama. This beautifully designed, accessibly priced book offers a wealth of illustrations by Beardsley, and introduces his exquisitely crafted drawings and prints to a new audience. Including a fascinating text by Jan Marsh, Aubrey Beardsley brings together a carefully curated selection of works from Beardsley’s tragically short but highly productive life.

This book reads Oscar Wilde as a queer theorist and Wilfred Owen as his symbolic son. It centers on the concept of 'male procreation', or the generation of new ideas through an erotic but non-physical connection between two men, and it sees Owen as both a product and a continuation of this Wildean tradition.

A study of Oscar Wilde's Salomé in modernist and postmodernist literature and culture