Abstracts
Abstract
Sade’s evil influence on Lord Byron haunts the margins of Byronic criticism. In this article I resuscitate the marginalized Marquis by tracing Byron’s influence on another son of Sade, the pseudo-Comte de Lautréamont. If Sade’s forever violated heroine Justine forms a hopelessly contradictory representation of Byron’s desire for in-nocence (or non-noxiousness) in the name of himself, his illicit affair with his half-sister Augusta, and his interminably complex rapport to other feminine, homosocial, and homosexual objects of desire, how does this clandestine influence estrange a user-friendly Byron from our comfortable stereotype of the poet as wholly different from that other aristocrat? An examination of Sade alongside Lautréamont’s Sadean strain in Maldoror replaces le mal at the core of Byron’s life-writing, thereby foregrounding his lordship’s attempt to evade the practical consequences of evil in his own work. Since Sade is also influential on contemporary criticism via poststructuralism or La Pensée 68, I work through the case of Foucault in order to show how this Sadean order of things is responsible for the tendency to evade confronting the ephemeral or merely literary status of “evil” in the nineteenth century (and beyond).
Appendices
Works Cited
- Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944.
- Alexander, Jonathan. “Sex, Violence, and Identity: A. C. Swinburne and Uses of Sadomasochism.” Victorian Newsletter 90 (Fall 1996): 33-36.
- Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
- Arasse, Daniel. The Guillotine and the Terror. 1987. Trans. Christopher Miller. New York: Penguin, 1989.
- Baird, Julian. “Swinburne, Sade, and Blake: The Pleasure-Pain Paradox.” Victorian Poetry 9 (1971): 49-75.
- Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. 1957. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. New York: Marion Boyars, 1997.
- Bayle, Pierre. Choix d’articles tirés du Dictionnaire historique et critique. Ed. Elisabeth Labrousse. 2 vols. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1982.
- Blanchot, Maurice. Lautréamont and Sade. 1949. Trans. Stuart and Michelle Kendall. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. “Le corps et le sacré.” Commerce des corps. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 104 (September 1994): 2.
- ———. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Raisons d’Agir Éditions, 2004.
- ———. and Passeron, Jean-Claude. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. 1970. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: Sage Publications, 1990.
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron’s Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 Vols. London: John Murray, 1973-1980.
- ———. The Complete Poetical Works. Eds. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller. 7 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980-1992.
- Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
- Cryle, Peter. Geometry in the Boudoir. Configurations of French Erotic Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
- ———. “Beyond the Canonical Sade.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 23.1 (March 2000): 15-25.
- Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.” The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. 1976. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. xi-xlviii.
- Didier, Béatrice. “Sade théologien.” Colloque de Cerisy: Sade, écrire la crise. Ed. R. Mauzi and P. Roger. Paris: Belfond, 1983. 219-40.
- Donoghue, William. “Vanille et Manille: Urology and the Body of the Text.” French Forum 29.3 (Fall 2004): 13-26.
- Ducasse, Isidore. Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont. Ed. and trans. Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994.
- Dyer, Gary. “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan.” PMLA 116.3 (2001): 562-78.
- Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
- Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. 1989. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
- Elledge, Paul. Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
- Epiphanius. The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis: Selected Passages. Trans. Philip R. Amidon. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
- Ferguson, Frances. Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
- Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1961. New York: Vintage, 1988.
- ———. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.
- ———. The Order of Things. 1966. New York: Vintage, 1970.
- Frappier-Mazur, Lucienne. 1991. Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.
- Gallop, Jane. Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981.
- Gonsalves, Joshua David. “What Makes Lord Byron Go: Strong Determinations—Private/Public—of Imperial Errancy.” Studies in Romanticism 41.2 (2002): 33-64.
- ———. “The Case of Antonin Artaud and the Possibility of Comparative (Religion) Literature.” Modern Language Notes 119.5 (December 2004): 1033-1057.
- Hulbert, James. “The Problems of Canon Formation and the ‘Example’ of Sade: Orthodox Exclusion and Orthodox Inclusion.” Modern Language Studies 18.1 (Winter 1988): 120-133.
- Klossowski, Pierre. Sade My Neighbor. 1947/1967. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Quartet, 1992.
- Knight, G. Wilson. Lord Byron’s Marriage: The Evidence of Asterisks. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
- Kramer Linkin, Harriet. (Editor) The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2005.
- Lacarrière, Jacques. The Gnostics. 1973. Trans. Nina Rootes. San Francisco: City Lights, 1989.
- Lack, Roland-François. Poetics of the Pretext: Reading Lautréamont. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1998.
- Laugaa-Traut, Françoise, ed. Lectures de Sade. Paris: Armand Colin, 1973.
- Le Brun, Annie. Sade: A Sudden Abyss. 1986. Trans. Camille Naish. San Francisco: City Lights, 1990.
- Lefrère, Jean-Jacques. Isidore Ducasse: auteur des Chants de Maldoror, par le comte de Lautréamont. Paris: Fayard, 1998.
- Lely, Gilbert. The Marquis de Sade: A Biography. 1952-1957. Trans. Alec Brown. London: Elek Books, 1961.
- Marchand, Leslie A. Byron: A Biography. 3 Vols. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1957.
- ———. Byron: A Portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.
- Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957.
- Mitchell, Jeremy. “Swinburne—The Disappointed Protagonist.” Yale French Studies 35 (1965): 81-88.
- Meyers, Terry L. “A Note on Swinburne and Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 21.1 (Summer 2003): 38-39.
- Neff, David Sprague. “Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity, and the History of Sexualities.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.3 (July 2002): 395-438.
- Ovid. Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation. Trans. David Raeburn. London: Penguin, 2004.
- Philip, Michel, ed. Lectures de Lautréamont. Paris: Armand Colin, 1971.
- Poster, Mark. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
- Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. 2nd edition. 1951. Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford UP, 1970.
- Sade, D. A. F. Les Infortunes de la vertu. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1959.
- ———. Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1955.
- ———. Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’École du Libertinage. Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1975.
- ———. La Philosophie dans le boudoir, ou les Instituteurs immoraux. Ed. Yvon Belaval. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
- ———. Selected Letters. 1963. Ed. Margaret Crosland. Trans. W. J. Strachan. New York: 1965.
- Senelick, Laurence. The Prestige of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero from Sade to Lacenaire. New York: Garland, 1987.
- Süe, Eugène. Latréaumont. 1837. Paris: Garnier, 1979.
- Thorslev, Peter L. Jr. “Byron and Bayle: Biblical Skepticism and Romantic Irony.” Byron, the Bible, and Religion: Essays from the Twelfth International Byron Seminar. Ed. Wolf Z. Hirst. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1991. 58-76.
- Weiss, Allen S. “The Epic of the Cephalopod.” Discourse 24.1 (Winter 2002): 150-159.
- Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for the Dismantling of a Dubious Category. Princeton, N.J.: 1996.