The Entrapments of Form : : Cruelty and Modern Literature / / Catherine Toal.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2017
• VerfasserIn: Toal, Catherine,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2016]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (184 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: The "Strange and Familiar Word" -- Chapter One. The Forms of the Perverse -- Chapter Two. "Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened" -- Chapter Three. Murder and "Point of View" -- Chapter Four. The Marquis de Sade in the Twentieth Century -- Chapter Five. American Cruelty -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index