Sexual Personae (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a groundbreaking and controversial survey of sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts written by scholar Camille Paglia. Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not destroy paganism, but rather drove it into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism, and contemporary popular culture, especially Hollywood. Drawing on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian, Paglia associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, while identifying Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She then proceeds to analyze literature and art from the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these binary forces.