Dancing in Her Seven Veils: Revisiting the Salome Craze in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s.

After its introduction to Chinese readers in the 1920s, Oscar Wilde's Salome enjoyed great popularity in China well into the 1930s and 1940s. While recognising the appeal of this play to the Chinese general public, existing scholarship either focuses on the political side--seeing Salome as a passionate and insubordinate character with a strong urge to pursue her love and sexuality--or conceptualises Salome as a fashionable commodity, with the so-called Salome craze an expression of a lifestyle associated with aestheticism and decadence in Shanghai. There is, however, little work on how the image of Salome was visually presented and interpreted in non-literary contexts in China. Drawing on Alexander Des Forges's notion of 'mediasphere Shanghai', this article addresses this gap by examining how the figure of Salome was visually presented to Chinese audiences through illustrations, art photography and theatrical performances. It also analyses how these visual representations interlinked and, together with the textual interpretation, constituted part of the expanding cosmopolitan culture in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. The article argues that Salome was by no means just a literary figure to be consumed for entertainment but an essential reference point for a modern and cosmopolitan vision envisaged by the public during the Republican period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]