Sexual personae : art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Paglia, Camille 1947- (Author).

Summary: Discusses the works of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, de Sade, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, and Emily Dickinson.

Record details

ISBN: 0679735798 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9780679735793 (pbk.)
Physical Description: print
xiv, 718 p. ; 21 cm.
Edition: 1st Vintage Books ed.
Publisher: New York : Vintage Books, 1991.

Content descriptions

General Note:	Reprint. Originally published: New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990. Donated in memory of Lionel V. Patenaude
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references (p. 675-700) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Sex and violence, or nature and art -- The birth of the western eye -- Apollo and Dionysus -- Pagan beauty -- Renaissance form: Italian art -- Spenser and Apollo: the Faerie queene -- Shakespeare and Dionysus: As you like it and Antony and Cleopatra -- Return of the great mother: Rousseau vs. Sade -- Amazons, mothers, ghosts: Goethe to Gothic -- Sex bound and unbound: Blake -- Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth -- The Daemon as lesbian vampire: Coleridge -- Speed and space: Byron -- Light and heat: Shelley and Keats -- Cults of sex and beauty: Balzac -- Cults of sex and beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans -- Romantic shadows: Emily Bronte -- Romantic shadows: Swinburne and Pater -- Apollo daemonized: decadent art -- The beautiful boy as destroyer: Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray -- The English epicene: Wilde's The importance of being earnest -- American decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville -- American decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James -- Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson.