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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Camille Paglia · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson · 304 pages
Discusses whether the brutal imagery present in reality and entertainment will shock society into a less alienated state and help create a just social order or whether focusing on representations of cruelty makes society more cruel.
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Charles Baudelaire · 224 pages
"Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet and writer, has also been called 'the father of modern criticism'. This stimulating volume gathers together some of his most celebrated critical writings."--Amazon.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud · 215 pages
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art
The Book of Legendary Lands
Umberto Eco · 478 pages
"A fascinating illustrated tour of the fabled places in literature and folklore that have awed, troubled, and eluded us through the ages"--Provided by publisher.
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun · 896 pages
"Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.". "In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of
Encounter
Milan Kundera · 192 pages
Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty.
This is Not a Pipe
Michel Foucault · 66 pages
What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambigui
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
Peter Ackroyd · 518 pages
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Marina Warner · 463 pages
Marina Warner looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history - from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christ
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
Daniel J. Boorstin · 811 pages
In this engrossing companion to his bestselling The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of achievement in the arts. The Discoverers, which has been translated into twenty languages, gave us an epic of the quest to understand the world, from the heavens to the human heart. Now Boorstin puts flesh on the great figures who hav
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
Roger Shattuck · 397 pages
The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
Walter Pater · 238 pages
Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was one of the most talked about books in nineteenth-century Britain, and it remains a work of unusual importance to anyone interested in art history or English literature. Pater’s luxurious and finely wrought style inspired generations of writers, and his unique blend of scholarship, philosophy, and personal bias made his view of the quinte
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Jeanette Winterson · 192 pages
"Jeanette Winterson argues in this collection for the importance of art in all our lives. In ten intertwined essays, the acclaimed author of such recent novels as Written on the Body and Art & Lies proposes art as an active force in the world - neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting even those who don't." "An act of courage and effrontery, a uniquely human endeavo
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
Orlando Figes · 748 pages
"Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.". "Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a "wind
A Place in the Country
W.G. Sebald · 208 pages
W. G. Sebald's meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind--and the last of this great writer's major works to be translated into English.
History of Beauty
Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages
From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual
Just Kids
Patti Smith · 336 pages
In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.
The Sadeian Woman
Angela Carter · 154 pages
Angela Carter turns concepts and assumptions about love and sex inside out with an original examination of Sade's ideas.
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway · 209 pages
A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously.[1] The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France. The memoir consists of various per
Comics and Sequential Art
Will Eisner · 158 pages
From the Publisher: A classic drawing textbook from an American comics pioneer, revised and enhanced for a new generation. Based on Will Eisner's legendary course at New York's School of Visual Arts, this guide has inspired generations of artists, students, teachers, and fans. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner reveals the basic building blocks and principles of comics, including imagery, the fr
Intercourse
Andrea Dworkin · 315 pages
Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men.