Selected 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 Reviews

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