Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

by Camille Paglia
Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

by Camille Paglia

Paperback(Reprint)

$23.00 
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Overview

The fiery, provocative, and unparalleled work of feminist art criticism that launched the exceptional career of one of our most important public intellectuals—"a remarkable book, at once outrageous and compelling, fanatical and brilliant.... One must be awed by [Paglia's] vast energy, erudition and wit" (The Washington Post).

Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’s David a bit of pedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and Elvis Presley, between Medusa and Madonna? How do liberals and feminists—as well as conservatives—fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since Egyptians invented beauty—making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature.

With 47 photographs.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780679735793
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/20/1991
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 736
Sales rank: 112,527
Product dimensions: 5.14(w) x 7.97(h) x 1.47(d)

About the Author

CAMILLE PAGLIA is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A regular contributor to Salon.com, she is the author of Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; Sexual Personae; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Vamps & Tramps.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
Chapter 2 The Birth of the Western Eye
Chapter 3 Apollo and Dionysus
Chapter 4 Pagan Beauty
Chapter 5 Renaissance Form: Italian Art
Chapter 6 Spenser and Apollo: The Faerie Queene
Chapter 7 Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra
Chapter 8 Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau vs. Sade
Chapter 9 Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts: Goethe to Gothic
Chapter 10 Sex Bound and Unbound: Blake
Chapter 11 Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth
Chapter 12 The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge
Chapter 13 Speed and Space: Byron
Chapter 14 Light and Heat: Shelley and Keats
Chapter 15 Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac
Chapter 16 Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans
Chapter 17 Romantic Shadows: Emily Brontë
Chapter 18 Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater
Chapter 19 Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art
Chapter 20 The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
Chapter 21 The English Epicene: Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
Chapter 22 American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
Chapter 23 American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James
Chapter 24 Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson

Notes

Index
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