Sade's Sensibilities

Sade's Sensibilities explores how the labels of "radical" and "libertine" have both energized and restricted Sade studies, how readings that emphasize Sade as a historically-situated writer and thinker have rarely come into contact with those celebrating the transformative and imaginative qualities of his texts. This volume seeks to bring together work that rigorously engages Sade's radicalism and also that resists the tendency to ostracize him from the broader historical and philosophical currents of the Enlightenment. We also still wish to allow for those accounts of Sade that see him as an anomaly, an outsider-criticism which continues to underscore the impenetrability of his texts and the ways in which his thinking transcends the long eighteenth century. Sade's Sensibilities, then, combines readings of Sade as the consummate radical with an important counter-portrait-that supplied by historicist criticism-that sees Sade as much a product of his historical moment and its emphasis on sensibility, community, and feeling as he is its most notorious deviant. Rather than increasingly segregate these two approaches to Sade, our volume brings them into closer and more intimate conversation.