TY - BOOK AU - Toal,Catherine TI - The Entrapments of Form: Cruelty and Modern Literature SN - 9780823269358 AV - PQ295.C7T63 2016 U1 - 840.9353 PY - 2016///] CY - New York, NY : PB - Fordham University Press, KW - American literature KW - History and criticism KW - 19th century KW - Cruelty in literature KW - French literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / General KW - Modernism (Literature) KW - France KW - United States KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century KW - bisacsh KW - American Literature KW - Contemporary Philosophy KW - Critical Theory KW - Cruelty KW - French Literature KW - Psychoanalysis N1 - 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; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823269372?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780823269372 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780823269372/original ER -