Salome: & Under the Hill

by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley

Overview

SALOME is an evocation of biblical horror in which blasphemies inflame an atmosphere that seethes with a dangerous erotic charge from the very outset. Relentless, hypnotic repetitions in the words, arranged in fugue cadences, lend the proceedings a masturbatory, oneiric quality: 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 to rival Huysmans' A Rebours. This, allied to its extraordinary catalogue of sexual perversions, makes it a unique and indispensable text for any who seek the uttermost extremes of the manifest imagination.

This joint edition of SALOME and UNDER-THE HILL, united by twenty of Beardsley's unsurpassable drawings, is a timely rehabilitation of these two all-too-often ignored fin-de-siecle texts, and constitutes a volume of unadulterated erotic decadence which stands at the pinnacle of the genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781902588902
Publisher:	Wet Angel Books
Publication date:	07/31/2012
Series:	FORBIDDEN EROTIC CLASSICS
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 — 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 — 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, executed in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau style and the poster movement was also significant.

Date of Birth:

October 16, 1854

Date of Death:

November 30, 1900

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

The Royal School in Enniskillen, Dublin, 1864; Trinity College, Dublin, 1871; Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 1874

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER I

How the Chevalier Tannhäuser entered into the Hill of Venus

The Chevalier Tannhäuser, having lighted off his horse, stood doubt­fully for a moment beneath the sombre gateway of the mysterious Hill, troubled with an exquisite fear lest a day's travel should have too cruelly undone the laboured niceness of his dress. His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand's in the drawing by Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finely-curled peruke, and from point to point of a precise toilet the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.
It was taper-time; when the tired earth puts on its cloak of mists and shadows, when the enchanted woods are stirred with light foot­falls and slender voices of the fairies, when all the air is full of delicate influences, and even the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream a little.
A delicious moment, thought Tannhäuser, to slip into exile.
The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures, showing such a cunning invention and such a curious knowledge, that Tannhäuser lingered not a little in reviewing them. They surpassed all that Japan has ever pictured from her maisons vertes, all that was ever painted in the cool bath­rooms of Cardinal La Motte, and even outdid the astonishing illus­trations to Jones's "Nursery Numbers".
"A pretty portal," murmured the Chevalier, correcting his sash.
As he spoke, a faint sound of singing was breathed out from the mountain, faint music as strange and distant as sea-legends that are heard in shells.
"The Vespers of Venus, I take it," said Tannhäuser, and struck a few chords of accompaniment, ever so lightly, upon his little lute. Softly across the spell-bound threshold the song floated and wreathed itself about the subtle columns, till the moths were touched with passion and moved quaintly in their sleep. ........