Description
Book SynopsisThe Functions of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts explores answers to two important questions about the age-old theme of evil: is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? By looking across several disciplines and analyzing evil as it is referenced across a broad spectrum of phenomena, this work demonstrates the varying ways that we interact with the ethical dilemma as academics, as citizens, and as people. The work draws from authors in different fieldsincluding history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychologyand from around the world to provide an analysis of evil in such topics as deeply canonical as Beowulf and Shakespeare to subjects as culturally resonant as Stephen King, Captain America, or the War on Terror. By bringing together this otherwise disparate collection of scholarship, this collection reveals that dis
Trade ReviewSelected from among papers presented at a 2014 conference titled Evil Incarnate: Manifestations of Villains and Villainy, these eclectic essays demonstrate, as Effron (MIT) and Johnson (Cuyahoga Community College) write in their introduction, that evil “has functionally grown beyond its limited construction in the fields of theology and moral philosophy.” Essays examine evil as an interpretative category in pop fiction (Stephen King, Deon Meyer), mass media (television, comic books), literature (Poe, Shakespeare, Marlowe), and historiography and contemporary politics (slavery, Auschwitz, the war on terror). One theme running through many of these disparate studies is the use of evil to denote monstrosity and otherness of various kinds. Another theme is the problem of personal agency and responsibility. Two outstanding contributions on the latter theme are Jeffrey Mullins's study of William Seward’s notorious legal defenses of accused murderers in the 19th century and Marion Duval’s study of the sexualization of Nazi motivation in postwar French fiction. Many of the essays “lie on the margins of field specificity,” as the editors write in their introduction, and this very fact makes the collection particularly stimulating. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
An interrogation of how evil has been represented, raged against, accounted for, excused and queried in Western culture, The Function of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts will be of great interest for scholars working on intellectual histories of morality. -- Stacy Gillis, Newcastle University
Table of ContentsIntroduction Brian Johnson and Malcah Effron 1. Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” Chu-chueh Cheng 2. The Winter’s Tale: Art and Redemption from Evil Olivia Coulomb 3. Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth Jamey Hecht 4. Seasonal Villainy: Radical Evil, Relativity and Redemptive Relationships Charity Fowler 5. The Name-of-the-Monster: Interpellation and the Construction of Evil Jim Casey 6. The Communicative Force of Evil: The Case of Stephen King Jessica Folio 7. When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction: French Postwar Literature and the Relationship between Evil and Sexuality Marian Duval 8. Poison and Antidote: Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen 9. Ghosts of the Old South: The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal Street Brian Johnson 10. Ace in the Hole and Its Public: Evil and the News Spectacle Julie Michot 11. The Evil Foreigner: Marvel Villains and the American National Identity from World War II to the War on Terror Joanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen 12. Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern Politics Riven Barton 13. A “Fiend Incarnate”: Sin, Science, and the Problem of Evil in the New American Nation Jeffrey Mullins
