This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, now made available to English-language readers for the first time. It focuses on several contemporary areas of interest: the explicitly libidinal components of Sade's work and the effects they engender, the textual and narrative apparatus that supports these operations, the ethical and political concerns that arise from them, and the problematic issues surrounding the conceptual closure of representation. Sade is placed at the center of current debates in literary and philosophical criticism, feminist and gender theory, aesthetics, rhetoric, and eighteenth-century French cultural history.