Will McMorran, BA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon)

Profile

I am currently writing a book entitled Reading Sade, which goes against the grain of Sadean criticism by exploring the works of Sade from the point of view of the reader. It focusses on what it is actually like to read Sade, and on the many questions - about authorship, readership, literature, violence, ethics - that reading Sade raises. I recently translated Philippe Brenot’s The Story of Sex for Particular Books, and co-translated Sade's 120 Days of Sodom for Penguin Classics with Thomas Wynn. My next projects include a translation of Sade’s La Marquise de Gange, a critical biography of Sade for Reaktion Press and further work on the translation and reception of Sade in the English-speaking world. My research interests include French and English eighteenth-century fiction, comparative literature, sexology, fictional representations of sexuality, and translation studies.

Research

Research Interests:

Comparative Literature, the Marquis de Sade, Fiction and Ethics, Cognitive Approaches to Reading Fiction.

Publications

For more details about my research see my academia webpage, and check out thebadbooksblog...

Translations

• Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (London: Penguin, 2016)
• Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn, The Story of Sex (London: Particular Books, 2016)

Monographs

• Reading Sade (current project)
• The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Oxford: Legenda, 2002)

Edited Volume

• (co-edited with Edith McMorran) Translation in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2001)

Journal Articles and Online Publications

• ‘The Marquis de Sade in English, 1800-1850’, Modern Language Review, 112 (3) (2017), pp.549-566
• 'Introducing the Marquis de Sade,' Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51 (2) (2015), pp.133-151.
• 'Behind the Mask? Sade and the Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome,' Modern Language Review, 109 (4) (2013), pp.1121-1134.
• 'Sade, or the Worst of All Possible Worlds,' Comparative Critical Studies, 9 (2012) pp.19-28.
• 'Les Visiteurs and the Quixotic Text,' French Cultural Studies, 19: 2 (2008), pp.159-172.
• 'Reading and Teaching Sade,' in A Different Sade: Food for Thought, ed. Marion Hobson (2007), British Academy.
• 'Intertextuality and Urtextuality: Sade's Justine Palimpsest,' Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19:3 (2007), pp.127-141.

Book Chapters

• ‘The Marquis, the Monster and the Scientist : Sade, Sexology and Criticism,’ in Sade’s Sensibilities, ed. Kate Parker and Norbert Sclippa (Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, 2014).
• 'The Sound of Violence: Listening to Rape in Sade,' in Representing Violence in France 1760-1820, ed. Thomas Wynn, SVEC (2013:10), pp.229-249.
• '"I've Started so I'll - " : Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne' in Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, ed. Rhian Atkin (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp.64-81.
• 'Cloud Atlas and If on a winter's night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel,' in David Mitchell: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Press, 2011), pp.154-74
• 'The Palimpsestic Heroine: Sade's Justine stories,' in The Flesh in the Text, eds. T. Baldwin, J. Fowler, S. Weller, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.59-78.
• 'Quichottisme et lumières: lectures romanesques de jeunesse (Scarron, Rousseau, Loaisel de Tréogate)' SVEC (2006:12)
• 'Descript and Non-Descript in La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu' in The City in French Writing: The Eighteenth-century Experience (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, February 2004), pp.1-25.
• 'Fielding in France: La Place's Tom Jones', SVEC (2001), pp.285-90.

Press Articles

• ‘The most impure tale ever written’: How The 120 Days of Sodom became a ‘classic’
  The Guardian, 8^th October 2016
• We translated the Marquis de Sade’s most obscene work – here’s how
  The Independent, 2 November 2016
• ‘The 120 Days of Sodom – countercultural classic or porn war pariah’
  The Conversation (USA), 21 December 2016)