The Entrapments of Form - by Catherine Toal (Paperback)

About the Book

This book describes the narrative form of cruelty in modern literature. It focuses on the two main literary traditions that carry the legacy of revolutionary upheaval in modernity, the French and the American, and shows the transfers of influence that create the contemporary outline of the concept.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

A feast for comparatists doing research on the interconnections of French and American literatures.---Bruno Penteado, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

About the Author

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