SOURCE: "Inside the Sadean Fortress: Les 120 journées de Sodome," in Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 263-326.

DeJean has published several books on French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on literature by and about women. In the following excerpt, she considers the relationship of The 120 Days of Sodom to the Classical literary tradition.

The invitation to a literary feast that Sade has his narrator extend to the reader [in the introduction to The 120 Days of Sodom] is representative of just that strain in Sade's work to which recent critics have been most sensitive, Sade's rejection of convention and his invitation to literary liberation. Furthermore, the portrait of Sade as author implicit in these lines also conforms to the image that lies behind recent criticism of his works: Sade as author is the literary equivalent of Sade the liberator of the Bastille...