Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

PAGLIA, Camille.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 112308

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

First edition of the author’s ground-breaking work. Octavo, original blue cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to close personal friend Ronald MacDonald, Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, prior to publication on the front free endpaper, “For Ron – Love, Camille December 1989.” Laid in is the original transmittal letter on Paglia’s Philadelphia University of Arts letterhead dated December 18, 1989 which reads, “Ron! Book to be released Feb. 14 (macabre joke from Yale Press??) Feminists will surely froth! – or so predicts Il Bloom – C.” Also laid in is a Bowdoin College postcard from Paglia to MacDonald at Smith College dated December 12, 1994 which reads in part, “RON!!!!!! Frenzy here – was on tour for weeks and weeks. 1) the Lesbian Avowee was Barbara Johnson – but yes La Carsen has been trifling with African-Am studies as well – in her drop books (Those two will ride any trend!) 2) yes, indeed I was present a Friedman’s speech vs. Vail Parks! As you see, I started a fashion for getting fired from Bennington!…” Also laid in is a flyer from a reading at the New York State Writers Institute on November 8, 1990 and a photocopied article of a review of the work published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Fine in a fine dust jacket. A remarkable association copy offering intimate insight into the overwhelming reception surrounding the publication of this landmark feminist work and the feminist academic culture of the 1990s.

"Sexual Personae is an enormous sensation of a book, in all the better senses of 'sensation'. There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design or insight" (Harold Bloom). "Provocative... a radical reappraisal of the human condition. Her style is marked by angry exhiliration, brittle epigrams and acid paradoxes" (Times Literary Supplement).