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Three decades after his death, Michel Foucault remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the last half-century. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are enduring classics. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the famous Collge de France. These seminal events, attended by thousands, created the benchmarks for contemporary social enquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorising individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defence developed in earlier works, Foucault shows how defining "normality" became a prerogative of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions-from the prisons to the family-meant to deal with "monstrosity," whether sexual, physical, or spiritual. The Collge de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation and understanding of Foucault's thought.
'It is time to die, Madame: there shall be no mercy for you..!' It was one of the most shocking crimes of the seventeenth century, and would provide Sade with the inspiration for the last novel he published. The beautiful and virtuous Euphrasie, admired by the King himself, falls in love with the young and handsome Alphonse, Marquis de Gange. Within the forbidding walls of his castle in Provence, however, sinister forces are conspiring against the young couple. Alphonse's brothers, the Abbé and the Chevalier, want Euphrasie for themselves. Published in English for the first time, The Marquise de Gange is a neglected Gothic classic by one of the most notorious authors in the literary canon. Although a departure from his earlier pornographic and libertine works, beneath the novel's thin veneer of respectability lurks the same subversive presence of an author plotting against virtue in distress.
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This collection of short works forms a documentary of life in the mid-nineteenth-century metropolis.