Philippe Brenot

Laetitia Coryn

Will McMorran

From Apes to Robots

Story of Sex

What does reading fictional violence do to us as readers? To find out, this provocative and original book turns to the works of an author synonymous with sexual violence: the Marquis de Sade. Drawing on psychology, cognitive literary studies, and empirical research, it argues that reading is a fundamentally embodied act – and one that implicates us far more than we might like to think in fictional depictions of violence. This book turns not just to Sade for answers, but to his readers. Where previous studies have focussed either on Sade’s language or his philosophy, this one places the lived experience of actual readers at the heart of its investigations. Taking particular scenes from Sade’s fiction, from a young girl posing as a statue in ‘Eugénie de Franval’ to the brutal rape of the heroine of Justine, this book explores what happens not just on the page but in the minds and bodies of readers as they bring these scenes to life. Drawing on questionnaires completed by readers of those scenes, and on his own experience as a reader, teacher and translator of Sade, the author challenges the disembodied approach that has dominated Sade studies and literary criticism more broadly over recent decades. This is not just a book about Sade—it’s a radical exploration of what happens to us when we are confronted with scenes of violence. Urgent, accessible, and personal, it offers a new model for understanding reading as a matter of making sensations as well as making sense.

Reading with the Marquis de Sade

Sensing Violence

"In the landscape of the early modern European comic novel the inn often features as a monument to digression - the perfect setting for chance encounters with strangers who always have a story to tell. This wide-ranging comparative study explores the special part played by the inn, tracing the progress of a succession of wayward heroes and narrators in five canonical texts: Cervantes's ""Don Quijote"", Scarron's ""Roman comique"", Fielding's ""Joseph Andrews"" and ""Tom Jones"", Sterne's ""Tristram Shandy"" and Diderot's ""Jacques le fataliste"". As this celebration of digressive fiction unfolds, a very different picture emerges of the novel's rise and development."

Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel

The Inn and the Traveller

Marquis de Sade

Loosely based on one of the most notorious crimes of the seventeenth century, The Marquise de Gange by The Marquis de Sade is a neglected classic. Although a departure from his earlier pornographic and libertine works, the novel reads with the same subversive tension of an author plotting against virtue in his distress.

Will McMorran

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