Sexual Personae Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson [Paperback]

Here is the fiery, provocative, and unparalleled work of feminist art criticism that launched Camille Paglia’s exceptional career as one of our most important public intellectuals. Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’sDavida 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.

47 photographs.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 ItandAntony 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 Bronte
Chapter 18 Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater
Chapter 19 Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art
Chapter 20 The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde'sThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Chapter 21 The English Epicene: Wilde'sThe IlÓ.