Sexual Personae

Everything great in Western culture has come from the quarrel with nature ... The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art.

In this blazing work of brilliant originality, a phenomenon ever since it was first published in 1990, Camille Paglia outlines a new unified theory of Western art and literature and the primacy of sex and violence within it. Identifying the competing symbolic forces of Apollo and Dionysus ― reason and instinct, order and chaos, logic and passion, male and female, civilisation and nature ― Sexual Personae outlines key archetypes that embody different levels of Apollonian and Dionysian forces: the Great Mother, the beautiful boy, the femme fatale, the amazon, amongst many others, and traces how these archetypes have animated the pagan battle that underlies all Western art and culture. Audacious, vastly erudite, and wildly entertaining, Sexual Personae is art history that invites us to see the entire world anew.

A fine, disturbing book. It seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his/her prejudices. It is very learned. Each sentence jabs like a needle.
― Anthony Burgess

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

Sexual Personae an enormous sensation of a book ... there is no book comparable in scope, stance, design, or insight ... A masterwork.
― Harold Bloom