Description
- Format: PDF
- Publisher: Yale University Press; New edition (3 Sept. 2001)
- Language: English
- 733 pages
- ISBN-10: 0300091273
- ISBN-13: 978-0300091274
Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’s David a bit of paedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and Elvis Presley, between the Medusa and Madonna? How do liberals and feminists – as well as conservatives – fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty – making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilisation and demonic nature.
In this brilliantly original book, Camille Paglia identifies some of the major patterns that have endured in western culture from ancient Egypt and Greece to the present. According to Paglia, one source of continuity is paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture. Others, she says, are androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive western eye, which has created our art and cinema.
Paglia follows these and other themes, from Nefertiti and the Venus of Willendorf to Apollo and Dionysus, from Botticelli and Michaelangelo to Shakespeare and Blake and finally to Emily Dickinson, who, along with other major 19th-century authors, becomes a remarkable example of Romanticism turned into Decadence.
Review
“Sexual Personae [is] an enormous sensation of a book, in all the better senses of ‘sensation.’ There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design or insight.” —Harold Bloom
“The ability to infuriate both antagonists in an ideological struggle is often a sign of a first-rate book. . . . [Paglia] is a conspicuously gifted writer . . . and an admirably close reader with a hard core of common sense.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Paglia marshals a vast array of . . . cultural materials with an authorial voice derived from sixties acid-rock lead guitar. . . . Close to poetry.” —Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces
“This book is a red comet in a smog-filled sky. . . . Brilliant.” —The Nation
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