Salome was a really engaging book to read and analyze. I thoroughly enjoyed this week and presenting. Wilde's text for Salome made me reminisce about childhood as "The Nightingale and the Rose" was one of my favourite fairy tales and I was also exposed to various biblical tales (including the one that inspired Salome).

This week we looked at the 1907 edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome which included 16 drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. I had never heard of this one act play before, so it was interesting to read through it and learn some of the context surrounding the play’s publication. Throughout the course (so far), I can better appreciate the importance of the image, text, and context connections because of all the important relations between the play, the drawings and Wilde’s story of creating the play.

I found Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play, Salomé, to be incredibly unique. His thin, unchanging line art, as well as his dominating use of negative space creates a style that is unlike any other we have looked at so far in this course, and one that overshadows the text itself for myself. In addition, the relationship between Beardsley's art and Wilde also creates a interesting dynamic, as Wilde was vocally not a fan of the illustrations. This disagreement between author and artist greatly shapes the way we analyse the text.