Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • 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 Queene
  • 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 Brontë
  • Chapter 18. Romantic shadows : Swinburne and Pater
  • Chapter 19. Apollo daemonized : decadent art
  • Chapter 20. The beautiful boy as destroyer : Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray
  • 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.