Representations of evil in fiction and film

This collection of essays examines representations of evil in the English-speaking world, especially in fiction and film. Some articles also touch upon evil in poetry, drama and political discourse. Though mainly centering on the nineteenth and twentieth century, this volume does cover a wide variety of phenomena, countries, genres, and media and may therefore function as an introductory survey to the phenomenon of evil in Anglophone literatures and cultures. The contributors try to elucidate the phenomenon of evil by approaching it from various angles, ranging from classic to popular cultural reflections in American, British, and Postcolonial Literatures. Individual essays discuss texts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, and Margaret Atwood, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Richard Wright, N. Scott Momaday, Greg Sarris, Norman Mailer, Bret Easton Ellis, Joyce Carol Oates, Chuck Palahniuk, Stuart O'Nan, Caleb Carr, Matthew Pearl, Erik Larson, Hal Lindsey, Robert Van Kampen, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The visual art form of movies is represented by discussions of films such as The Birth of a Nation, The Night of the Hunter, The Usual Suspects and, especially, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. Furthermore, the political speech of George W. Bush and Tony Blair is explored for its strategic use of evil.