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Sexual Personae

Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

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About this listen

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.

©1990 Yale University (P)2017 Tantor Gender Studies Personal Development Social Sciences Ancient History Middle Ages Mythology

Critic reviews

"'Pagan' in its own pictorialism, sprawl, and unstopped prose, [Paglia's] unusual book creates its brilliant effect from an explosive fusing of scholarship and theater." ( Kirkus)
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The enormous breadth of Camille Paglia's scholarship and the depth of her study are utterly staggering as she works her way through the ages analysing seminal works of art in terms of the tension/balance between the cthonian and the apollonian (which she identifies with the female and the male elements respectively). The book makes so many genuinely profound points and insights that it had me completely gripped from beginning to end (and it's not a brief work!). The masterful opening chapter examines the origin and nature of the female and male forces in art and perfectly sets the tone for the detailed analyses of art and literature that follow. This magnificent work is narrated perfectly and with great understanding by Emily Durante.

A monumental achievement

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How anyone can even internalise the entire Canon of Western art, let alone process it so comprehensively and then so accurately discern the underlying psychological processes giving rise to it is completely and utterly dazzling.

To then so lucidly share that stunning analysis is still more impressive.

Camille Paglia is the most remarkable intellectual I have ever had the good fortune to discover. Her appearances on YouTube are all worth seeking out and learning from.

Paglia is the most remarkable intellect

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