"That terrible, coloured little tragedy"?: Oscar Wilde, Salome, and genre in transition

Oscar Wilde's play Salome is subtitled "A Tragedy in One Act." Wilde, as a classical scholar and winner of the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek at Trinity College, Dublin, would have been only too familiar with Aristotle's definition of tragedy in the Poetics, which relies on key structural elements such as character, action, pity and fear, peripeteia, and catharsis. This paper will examine not only the aesthetics of Wilde's play and the ways it might - and might not meet the definition of tragedy; it will also explore the play's critical reception to interrogate the ways in which the play intersects with those of Wilde contemporaries, and locate its place in drama's evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.