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Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Petra Dierkes-Thrun. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 247. $65.00 (cloth).
For every "Oscar Wilde" may be found infinite other Wildes. Enigma, paradox, and multiplicity were his stock in trade. He was, among many other things, a remarkably accomplished dilettante, meeting success of various degrees with a relatively scant but remarkable oeuvre of public lectures, poems, essays, epigrams, a novel, short stories, and plays, not only ranging across genres but hybridizing a vast array of historic and contemporary models and styles. Indeed, it was precisely the undecidability of his work and life that fueled his fame, and his notoriety. That was both cultivated and not; he wrote intensively but sporadically, in between competing distractions. His pithy epigrams, with their tricksy doublings and inversions-some of which were read aloud, in one of the trials that would lead to his "gross indecency" conviction, as evidence of dangerously deviant thought structures, both in content and in form-were deftly engineered for productive perplexity. Yet many of his other works, such as the play Salome, combine hodgepodge conflicting impulses and far-flung influences in a manner indicating less evident design. The same may be said in terms of his career at large: heuristically, he tended to seize upon what worked, or seemed as if it ought to work, at a given moment, then to move on to the next plan. For over a century, artistic interpreters and critics have labored to impose order upon the chaotic collection of works, traits, and ideologies adherent to Wilde, casting him variously as an Irish radical, an Anglophilic runaway, an ardent socialist, a crass capitalist, an unregenerate elitist, and more. It is...