The Entrapments of Form

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, 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.

Catherine Toal is Professor of Literature and Dean of the College at Bard College Berlin, Germany. Her main areas of research are nineteenth-century Anglophone, French, and German literature, and critical and cultural theory. She was the recipient of dissertation prizes in American literature and in nineteenth-century literature for her graduate work at Harvard University and has held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.