The Entrapments of Form ─ Cruelty and Modern Literature

This book shows that cruelty has a definite shape in modern literature, and that its narrative form is inextricably connected to changes in the understanding of the concept in the wake of the Enlightenment. It traces two central traditions of contribution to the modern understanding of cruelty, which show widely divergent conclusions, both of them far from quotidian understandings of the term: a French literary celebration of cruelty, and an American tendency to reduce it to a question of failing to notice or empathize with the sufferings of others. These two trajectories follow from differences in engagement with the revolutionary promise of modernity. They also show points of intersection, dialogue and influence. The book charts these contrasts and exchanges, from Edgar Allan Poe to contemporary critical and cultural theory. In its unfolding, it offers definitive readings of classic texts (e.g. Henry James'sThe Turn of the Screw, and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno) and of theoretical paradigms indispensable to the reading of literature, including Lacanian psychoanalysis and the political interventions of philosophy more generally. In contemporary scholarship, "cruelty" largely makes its appearance as an object of neuro-scientific study, or, in literary criticism, as the sensational element in the visual and theatrical aesthetics of violence. This study focuses instead on its structural logic, illuminating the workings of a motif that remains at once thematically dominant and formally obscure in modern literature, one which determines narratives compelling force.

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.