Sexual Personae

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Cover of the first edition
Author	Camille Paglia
Cover artist	Louise Fili
Language	English
Subject	The Decadent movement Paganism in art Apollonian/Dionysian opposition Sexual archetypes
Publisher	Yale University Press
Publication date	1990
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	712
ISBN	9780300043969

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.^[1] The book became a bestseller,^[2] and was praised by numerous literary critics, although it also received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars.