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 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.
Author
A preoccupation with sexual violence characterizes novels, plays, and short stories that Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade but known as marquis de Sade, of France wrote. After this writer derives the word sadism, the deriving of sexual gratification from fantasies or acts that involve causing other persons to suffer physical or mental pain. This aristocrat, revolutionary politician, and philosopher exhibited famous libertine lifestyle. His works include dialogues and political tracts; in his lifetime, he published some works under his own name and denied authorship of apparently anonymous other works. His best erotic works combined philosophical discourse with pornography and depicted fantasies with an emphasis on criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. Morality, religion or law restrained not his "extreme freedom." Various prisons and an insane asylum incarcerated the aristocrat for 32 years of his life: ten years in the Bastile, another year elsewhere in Paris, a month in Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes, three years in Bicêtre, a year in Sainte-Pélagie, and 13 years in the Charenton asylum. During the French revolution, people elected this criminal as delegate to the National Convention. He wrote many of his works in prison.
