I believe the original poster may have been referring to another
Camille Paglia book, perhaps her newest
Vamps and Tramps, as there is no essay titled “No Law in the Arena” in
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
Sexual Personae is broken down as follows:
Note: Chapter Critiques to follow soon.
Chapter 1:
Sex and
Violence, or
Nature and
Art
Chapter 2: The Birth of the Western Eye
Chapter 3:
Apollo and
Dionysus.
Chapter 4:
Pagan Beauty.
Chapter 5:
Renaissance Form:
Italian Art.
Chapter 6:
Spenser and Apollo:
The Faerie Queen
Chapter 7:
Shakespeare and Dionysus:
As You Like It and
Antony and Cleopatra
Chapter 8: Return of the Great Mother:
Rousseau vs.
Sade
Chapter 9: Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts:
Goethe to
Gothic
Chapter 10: Sex Bound and Unbound:
Blake
Chapter 11: Marriage to Mother Nature:
Wordsworth
Chapter 12: The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire:
Coleridge
Chapter 13: Speed and Space:
Byron
Chapter 14: Light and Heat:
Shelley and
Keats
Chapter 15:
Cults of
Sex and
Beauty:
Balzac
Chapter 16: Cults of Sex and Beauty:
Gautier,
Baudelaire, and
Huysmans
Chapter 17: Romantic Shadows:
Emily Bronte
Chapter 18: Romantic Shadows:
Swinburne and
Pater
Chapter 19:
Apollo Daemonized: Decadent
Art
Chapter 20: The Beautiful Boy as Destroyed:
Wilde The Picture of Dorian Grey
Chapter 21: The English Epicene: Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
Chapter 22: American Decadents:
Poe,
Hawthorne,
Melville
Chapter 23: American Decadents:
Emerson,
Whitman,
James
Chapter 24: Amherst’s Madame de Sade:
Emily Dickinson
From the back cover:
“Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is
David by
Donatello a bit of
pedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and
Elvis Presley, between the
Medusa and
Madonna? How do liberals and feminists – as well as conservatives – fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of
Western culture, high and low, since the
Egyptians invented beauty – making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature.”
According to the Critics:
“Paglia's "Sexual Personae" is a massive work of Olympian learning; the most important book of the last 3 decades and certainly one of the greatest literary tomes of the century. This book in itself is utterly more valuable than a complete undergraduate
education at one of our most prestigious
universities.”
Noted literary critic
Harold Bloom has called the book “…an enormous sensation of a book in all the better senses of ‘sensation’. There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design or insight.”
And perhaps that is the books major fault. Though the book is incredibly researched and detailed, the scope and stance of this book will leave many casual readers gasping for air. Further, Paglia’s
Sexual Personae will challenge many widely-held beliefs and lambaste
Republicans,
Democrats, and
Feminists alike. If you belong in any of those categories, check your
ego at the door.
An incredibly bold book by a gutsy woman.