Sexual personae : art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson / Camille Paglia.

New York : Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1991.

xiv, 718 pages : black and white illustrations ; 21 cm

1st Vintage books ed.

Reprint. Originally published: New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 675-700) and index.

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.