Introduction

The introduction opens with a brief overview of literary critical approaches to Sade since the 1960s, the decade which saw the first academic conference devoted to Sade as well as influential publications by Roland Barthes among others. It reflects on the dominant trends in Sade scholarship thereafter, the linguistic and the historicist, and argues that, for all their insights, these approaches have not been conducive to addressing the affective force of the violence that arguably defines the Sadean oeuvre. The introduction then makes the case for an embodied cognition approach, drawing on empirical evidence, that places the lived reading experiences of actual readers at the heart of the study of Sade, and indeed literary studies more generally. Drawing on the latest work in cognitive literary studies, it sets up the chapters to come by familiarizing the reader with the range of mental imagery that readers of fiction experience from the visual to the kinaesthetic.