Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

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’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.

47 photographs.

• Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
• Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education
• Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
• Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
• Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
• The Origins and History of Consciousness (Mythos: The Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology)
• Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems
• Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
• Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
• Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief