Salome/Under the Hill

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.

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 THEe ^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 UNDERe ^THEe ^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.