Sexual Personae

‘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

‘A remarkable book, at once outrageous and compelling, fanatical and brilliant … One must be awed by Paglia’s vast energy, erudition and wit.’

* The Washington Post *

‘A crazy and brilliant survey of Western literature.’

* Michael Pollan’s 10 favourite books, New York Times Style Magazine *

‘Camille Paglia’s syncretic theoretical enterprise invoking Frazer, Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom, from anthropology to influence theory and psychobiography, is an immense tour de force.’

-- Pat Righelato

‘One of the few thoroughly enjoyable works of criticism written in the American language in the last couple of decades … immensely ambitious, vastly erudite, feisty, often outrageous, and sometimes dazzlingly brilliant.’

-- Robert Alter

‘Wild and brilliant.’

-- Bruce Thornton

‘A powerful account of gender as depicted in Western art and literature.’

-- Melvin Konner

‘Paglia marshals a vast array of … cultural materials with an authorial voice derived from sixties acid-rock lead guitar … Close to poetry.’

-- Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces

‘Paglia charts a vast theory of western culture and its Decadent undertow, detonating sacrosanct contemporary thought and doctrine at every turn … “Pagan” in its own pictorialism, sprawl, and unstopped prose, her unusual book creates its brilliant effect from an explosive fusing of scholarship and theatre.’

-- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

‘This book is a red comet in a smog-filled sky … Brilliant.’

* The Nation *

‘An essential public intellectual.’

* Vi