Overview

Arguing that cruelty acquires a new meaning in modernity, The Entrapments of Form follows its evolution through exchanges between French and American literature over the contradictions of Enlightenment (slavery, genocide, libertine aristocratic privilege). Catherine Toal traces Edgar Allan Poe's influence on the Sadean legacy, Melville's fictional dramatization of Tocqueville, and Henry James's response to the aesthetic of his French contemporaries, including Flaubert. The result is not simply a work that provides close readings of key literary texts of the nineteenth century-Benito Cereno, The Turn of the Screw, Les Chants de Maldoror-but one that shows how in this era cruelty develops a specific narrative structure, one that is confirmed by the manner of its negation in twentieth-century philosophy. The final chapters address this shift: the postwar French reception of Sade and the relationship between American cultural theory and the rhetoric of the so-called war on terror.

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9780823269341

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Reviews

This is a bracing book, a powerful argument on a topic of real import, written with unusual elegance and panache. -- -Amanda Claybaugh Harvard University

GCGBPThis is a bracing book, a powerful argument on a topic of real import, written with unusual elegance and panache.GC[yen] GCoAmanda Claybaugh, Harvard University This is a bracing book, a powerful argument on a topic of real import, written with unusual elegance and panache. --Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University This is a book of outstanding intellectual distinction. It combines close readings of a wide range of carefully-chosen and appropriate literary texts with philosophical speculation of the highest theoretical order. --Thomas Docherty, University of Warwick

This is a bracing book, a powerful argument on a topic of real import, written with unusual elegance and panache. --Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University This is a book of outstanding intellectual distinction. It combines close readings of a wide range of carefully-chosen and appropriate literary texts with philosophical speculation of the highest theoretical order. --Thomas Docherty, University of Warwick

This is a bracing book, a powerful argument on a topic of real import, written with unusual elegance and panache. -Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University

Author Information

Catherine Toal is Professor of Literature and Dean of the College at Bard College Berlin, Germany.

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