Passionate Philosopher: A Marquis De Sade Reader - Hardcover

Sade, Marquise De

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0720608260 ISBN 13: 9780720608267

Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd, 1992

Synopsis

For all his notoriety, the Marquis de Sade must head the list of writers who are more talked about than read. In this new, representative selection Margaret Crosland encourages us to take a fresh look at his work.
Sade spent more than half his life in prison, but for which he would have had scant cause to take his revenge on society through evocations of sexual cruelty. Excluded from normal life, he developed an extremist vision of the world through stories, dialogues and historical novels. Included here are extracts from his major fiction: some of the devastating fantasies in Les Cent Vingt Journees de Sodome as well as episodes from Justine and from the compulsively vicious Juliette.
Yet, in addition to his so-called 'obscene' writing, Sade wrote with equal fervour about idealized people and democratic societies. He was indeed a passionate philosopher, a man typical in his own way of his times but eager to pass on to later centuries his incandescent ideas about human behaviour.
Following her Introduction, Margaret Crosland provides astute commentaries on her selections, and finally a Chronology and Bibliography.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

From Publishers Weekly:

Unabridged, the lewd writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) can be wordy, repetitious and sickening. Taken in the small doses gathered in this tart, eye-opening anthology, however, they prove the adage that less is often more. Along with the libertine who explored the extreme limits of sex, we meet the utopian social philosopher who, in Aline et Valcour , portrayed a South Seas island paradise where all social customs are democratized; here Zame, the novel's white-haired sage, delivers a defense of vegetarianism. In stories, dialogues and extracts from novels, Sade airs his defiance of all forms of authority, vents his atheistic, anticlerical beliefs and sets forth a principled rejection of the death penalty. Juliette, the eponymous heroine of one of his novels, is a mass murderer preoccupied with sex, crime, power and money; her obsessions prefigure modern neuroses and social ills. Crosland, translator of two volumes of Sade's stories, provides a candid introduction and running commentaries that persuasively depict Sade, imprisoned 27 years, as an iconclast revenging himself on society by highlighting humankind's capacity for cruelty.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0720608260
• ISBN 13: 9780720608267
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224