SOURCE: “Face Value and the Value of Face in Les Liaisons dangereuses: The Rhetoric of Form and the Critic's Seduction,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 228-48.

In the following essay, Camargo provides an overview of recent scholarly reaction to Les Liaisons dangereuses, outlining distinctions between different critical interpretations of the novel.

Written by Choderlos de Laclos to pass the time when he was stationed at a boring outpost on the western coast of France, Les Liaisons dangereuses has been the subject of intense debate since its publication in 1782 and has been variously described as both cynical and moralizing, as feminist and misogynist, as counseling hypocrisy and as attacking it, as a textbook of seduction techniques and as a warning not to use them. In a review of the literature on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the novel's publication, David Coward noted that...