The Salome Project

We are not even sure of her name: it might have been Salome; it might have been Herodias, like that of her mother. She appears very briefly in only two Gospels of the New Testament, to dance at the birthday party of her mother's husband, Herod, the ruler of Galilee. We do not even know what kind of dance it was, but we are told that it pleased him so much he promised to give her anything she asked for. What she asked for was the head of the prophet John the Baptist on a platter. Although she disappeared from the pages of the New Testament, Salome and her dance have puzzled, intrigued, and dominated the imaginations of artists and writers for two millennia. Was she just a little girl doing a dance performance to please her stepfather and his guests? Was she a nubile teenager bent on seduction? Was she a femme fatale who aimed at the death of a man she could not possess? The Salome Project is the result of a quest to answer these questions and find the real Salome.

We are not even sure of her name: it might have been Salome; it might have been Herodias, like that of her mother. She appears very briefly in only two Gospels of the New Testament, to dance at the birthday party of her mother’s husband, Herod, the ruler of Galilee. We do not even know what kind of dance it was, but we are told that it pleased him so much he promised to give her anything she asked for. What she asked for was the head of the prophet John the Baptist on a platter. Although she disappeared from the pages of the New Testament, Salome and her dance have puzzled, intrigued, and dominated the imaginations of artists and writers for two millennia. Was she just a little girl doing a dance performance to please her stepfather and his guests? Was she a nubile teenager bent on seduction? Was she a femme fatale who aimed at the death of a man she could not possess? The Salome Project is the result of a quest to answer these questions and find the real Salome.

Based on a story from the Bible, ‘Salomé’ provoked such outrage that it was banned from the British stage for a number of years. However, fiercely defended by academics for its literary worth, that law was finally overturned. In this dark tale, the beautiful Salomé tries to seduce the imprisoned prophet, Iokanaan. When he refuses her advances, Salomé is transformed into the ultimate femme fatale. A lyrical and fascinating play that deals with the themes of love, lust, revenge, murder, and madness, ‘Salomé’ is ideal for those who want to see Wilde at his most bloodthirsty. Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish novelist, poet, playwright, and wit. He was an advocate of the Aesthetic movement, which extolled the virtues of art for the sake of art. During his career, Wilde wrote nine plays, including ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan,’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance,’ many of which are still performed today. His only novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ was adapted for the silver screen, in the film, ‘Dorian Gray,’ starring Ben Barnes and Colin Firth. In addition, Wilde wrote 43 poems, and seven essays. His life was the subject of a film, starring Stephen Fry.

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.

This English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken offers a rare, intimate view of the philosopher by Lou Salomé, a free-thinking, Russian-born intellectual to whom Nietzsche proposed marriage at only their second meeting. Published in 1894 as its subject languished in madness, Salomé's book rode the crest of a surge of interest in Nietzsche's iconoclastic philosophy. She discusses his writings and such biographical events as his break with Wagner, attempting to ferret out the man in the midst of his works. Salomé's provocative conclusion -- that Nietzsche's madness was the inevitable result of his philosophical views -- generated considerable controversy. Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, dismissed the book as a work of fantasy. Yet the philosopher's longtime acquaintance Erwin Rohde wrote, "Nothing better or more deeply experienced or perceived has ever been written about Nietzsche." Siegfried Mandel's extensive introduction examines the circumstances that brought Lou Salomé and Nietzsche together and the ideological conflicts that drove them apart.

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.

"In the past, histories of American art have traditionally highlighted the work of a familiar roster of artists, often white and male. Over time the achievements of others worthy of attention, including numerous women and artists of color, as well as white men, have gone uncelebrated and fallen into obscurity. In this collection of essays, sixty-three scholars from various institutions, specialties, and locales respond to the challenge to nominate one maker deserving remembrance and detail the reasons for their choice. The collection is headed by a preface from editor Charles C. Eldredge, explaining the genesis of the anthology, and an introduction by Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick, promoting the value of recovered reputations and oeuvres in the training of future art experts and audiences"--