{"product_id":"the-marquis-de-sade-a-life-9780679404071","title":"The Marquis de Sade: A Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eA wholly original  compellingly human portrait of the \"divine Marquis \" the enigmatic legend whose name is synonymous with brutal perversion and desirous cruelty.  Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France  Neil Schaeffer reconstructs the almost incredible adventures of Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade. When he was a young man  married off against his wishes to a middle-class heiress  his insatiable sexual appetites and disdain for all forms of convention drew him into a series of scandals  first with prostitutes and then with his sister-in-law. His enraged  social-climbing mother-in-law conspired with the authorities  and the result was Sades thirteen-year imprisonment without trial. Later  freed by the Revolution  the brilliantly protean Marquis became a revolutionary leader himself and then narrowly escaped the guillotine. But with the publication of the novels he wrote behind bars  books denounced as lewd and blasphemous  he was again imprisoned. Under Napoleon  Sade spent almost twelve years in an insane asylum  where he died at the age of seventy-four following a final dalliance with a teenage girl.  Schaeffer reveals the surprisingly unsadistic Sade: his capacity for deep romantic love  his passionate adherence to Enlightenment principles  his inexhaustible charm  his delusional paranoia. And through a dazzling reading of his novels  including the notorious masterpiece 120 Days of Sodom  he argues powerfully for Sade as one of the great literary imaginations of the eighteenth century  one who maintained a lifelong  ultimately self-destructive argument against the limitations of authority and morality. Based on a decade of research  The Marquis de Sade is a definitive work that shatters nearly two hundred years of myth to reveal an irresistible Promethean figure of astonishing complexity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45648328196149,"sku":"ByrdShop_0679404074","price":40.54,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780679404071.jpg?v=1781715791","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-marquis-de-sade-a-life-9780679404071","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}