The Function of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts

The Function 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 fields―including history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychology―and 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 discussions of evil across disciplines have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. This work thus opens the conversation about evil outside of field-specific limitations, simultaneously demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds.

Jim Casey is an independent scholar based in the USA. He has retired from teaching but is still active in the field, and has over thirty peer-reviewed publications, including an edition of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen and the collection Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (2017). He is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Grant recipient, and past President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.