Sade’s Idea About Novels: Argumentative Strategies of a Discreet Polemicist

Abstract

In Idée sur les romans Sade outlines an original theory of the novel. This paper identifies his agreements and disagreements with other contemporary French theories on this genre (especially Diderot’s and Marmontel’s), and in doing so highlights the innovation of Sade’s essay. In order to debunk theories that claim the moral authority of the novel, Sade criticizes the idea of nature and of verisimilitude endorsed by them. Since his discrepancies with those eighteenth-century hegemonic conceptions are formulated indirectly, Sade’s position regarding the function of the novel as well as the connection between the fictional and historical—and the fictional and the “natural”—demands a careful look into Sade’s argumentative strategies.