The Life And Ideas Of The Marquis De Sade
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in Western history have provoked as much fascination, revulsion, and intellectual debate as Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade — a man so singular in his obsessions that his very name entered the lexicon of human psychology. Geoffrey Gorer's landmark study presents a rigorous and unflinching portrait of this notorious eighteenth-century French aristocrat, tracing his turbulent life from the libertine excesses of pre-Revolutionary France through his long years of imprisonment, and situating his scandalous literary output within a coherent philosophical framework. Gorer argues, with remarkable intellectual courage, that de Sade was not merely a purveyor of transgression but a systematic thinker whose ideas anticipated later developments in psychology, politics, and moral philosophy. Written with scholarly precision yet rendered accessible to the general reader, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade illuminates the broader cultural anxieties of the Enlightenment era, unmasking the tension between reason, desire, and social constraint that de Sade's work so violently embodied. Gorer's prose is measured and authoritative, resisting the sensationalism that so often surrounds its subject, and instead situating de Sade alongside the great iconoclasts of European thought. For anyone who has ever wondered how a man's private obsessions could permanently alter the language we use to describe cruelty and pleasure, this essential work offers an answer that is as unsettling as it is compelling.
Author: Geoffrey Gorer
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in Western history have provoked as much fascination, revulsion, and intellectual debate as Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade — a man so singular in his obsessions that his very name entered the lexicon of human psychology. Geoffrey Gorer's landmark study presents a rigorous and unflinching portrait of this notorious eighteenth-century French aristocrat, tracing his turbulent life from the libertine excesses of pre-Revolutionary France through his long years of imprisonment, and situating his scandalous literary output within a coherent philosophical framework. Gorer argues, with remarkable intellectual courage, that de Sade was not merely a purveyor of transgression but a systematic thinker whose ideas anticipated later developments in psychology, politics, and moral philosophy. Written with scholarly precision yet rendered accessible to the general reader, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade illuminates the broader cultural anxieties of the Enlightenment era, unmasking the tension between reason, desire, and social constraint that de Sade's work so violently embodied. Gorer's prose is measured and authoritative, resisting the sensationalism that so often surrounds its subject, and instead situating de Sade alongside the great iconoclasts of European thought. For anyone who has ever wondered how a man's private obsessions could permanently alter the language we use to describe cruelty and pleasure, this essential work offers an answer that is as unsettling as it is compelling.