“Cruelty” is intuitively recognized by readers as a theme and even a dramatic kernel of literary works, especially in portrayals of human interaction. Philosophers have proposed that literature is uniquely suited for examining the problem of cruelty, suggesting that it cannot be accommodated by abstract or idealizing system. What if, however, cruelty in modern literature possesses a specific form? This book elucidates that essential structure. Beginning with an overview of the historical development of the concept, it argues that the post-Enlightenment model of cruelty manifests a new and dete ... More

“Cruelty” is intuitively recognized by readers as a theme and even a dramatic kernel of literary works, especially in portrayals of human interaction. Philosophers have proposed that literature is uniquely suited for examining the problem of cruelty, suggesting that it cannot be accommodated by abstract or idealizing system. What if, however, cruelty in modern literature possesses a specific form? This book elucidates that essential structure. Beginning with an overview of the historical development of the concept, it argues that the post-Enlightenment model of cruelty manifests a new and determinate outline. The two major cultural legacies of late eighteenth-century revolutionary upheaval, French and American, reveal a direct contrast, as well as important instances of entwinement, in modes of confrontation with (or suppression of) cruelty. The relationship of exchange and divergence between them uncovers the modern shape of the phenomenon. Tracing its unfolding generates a definitive understanding of classic texts (by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Herman Melville, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Antonin Artaud) and of key theoretical frameworks from psychoanalysis to the urgent political interventions of contemporary critical and cultural theory. This study uncovers the distance between quotidian assumptions about cruelty and its philosophical, historical, and cultural variants, and identifies its driving mechanism as a literary effect.