This joint centennial edition of Salome and Under the Hill, united by seventeen of Beardsley’s unsurpassable drawings, is a timely rehabilitation of these two all-too-often ignored fin-de-siècle texts, and constitues a volume of unadulterated Decadent Erotica which must surely stand as the apogee of its kind.
Censored, banned, and ridiculed upon publication, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, written in 1892 in the French language, must now be viewed as one of the greatest of all Decadent texts; an aesthetic masterwork which has seldom been accorded due respect.
Salome is an evocation of biblical horror in which blasphemies abound. More than this, its atmosphere seethes with a dangerous erotic charge from the very outset. Relentless, hypnotic repetitions in the words, arranged in fugue cadences, the tale unfolds with the inexorable acceleration of an orgasmic nightmare.
Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill, a short work commenced in 1894, but left unfinished at the time of Beardsley’s premature demise, nonetheless achieves the quintessence of Decadence, an evocation of a synaesthetic pleasure dome. A unique and indispensable text for any who seek the uttermost extremes of the manifest imagination.
