Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Conventions
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette
- Part II The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
- 7 The Early French Novel and the Circum-Atlantic
- 8 Anglo-French Relations and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century
- 9 The Fiction of Diderot and Rousseau
- 10 The Memoir Novel
- 11 Epistolary Fiction: The Novel in the Postal Age
- 12 The Libertine Novel
- 13 Sade and the Novel
- Part III After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Part IV From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman
- Part V Fictions of the Fifth Republic: From de Gaulle to the Internet Age
- Index
- References
13 - Sade and the Novel
from Part II - The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2021
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Conventions
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette
- Part II The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage
- 7 The Early French Novel and the Circum-Atlantic
- 8 Anglo-French Relations and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century
- 9 The Fiction of Diderot and Rousseau
- 10 The Memoir Novel
- 11 Epistolary Fiction: The Novel in the Postal Age
- 12 The Libertine Novel
- 13 Sade and the Novel
- Part III After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Part IV From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman
- Part V Fictions of the Fifth Republic: From de Gaulle to the Internet Age
- Index
- References
Summary
Sade was a reader, writer and critic deeply immersed in the prose fiction of his time. His own oeuvre brings together diverse traditions of storytelling ranging from anecdotes, whore dialogues and libertine novels to philosophical contes, sentimental fiction and the Gothic novel. While works such as Thérèse philosophe offered him a model for the 120 Days of Sodom and the Histoire de Juliette, Richardson’s Clarissa provided him with a template of virtue in distress which he would repeatedly exploit in novels ranging from Justine to his later historical fiction such as La Marquise de Gange. This chapter explores some of the key tropes Sade borrows from these antecedents, and the ways in which he recycles these tropes – often to very different ends – within a diverse novelistic corpus still viewed too narrowly by critics and publishers alike.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of the Novel in French , pp. 237 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021