Malcah Effron is lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).Brian Johnson is assistant professor of humanities at Cuyohoga Community College

• Introduction Brian Johnson and Malcah Effron1. Villainous Victimhood in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”Chu-chueh Cheng2. The Winter’s Tale: Art and Redemption from EvilOlivia Coulomb3. Guilt, Evil, and Hell in Doctor Faustus and MacbethJamey Hecht4. Seasonal Villainy: Radical Evil, Relativity and Redemptive RelationshipsCharity Fowler5. The Name-of-the-Monster: Interpellation and the Construction of EvilJim Casey6. The Communicative Force of Evil: The Case of Stephen KingJessica Folio7. When Real Life Isn’t Evil Enough for Fiction: French Postwar Literature and the Relationship between Evil and SexualityMarian Duval8. Poison and Antidote: Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s PeakSam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen9. Ghosts of the Old South: The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal StreetBrian Johnson10. Ace in the Hole and Its Public: Evil and the News SpectacleJulie Michot11. The Evil Foreigner: Marvel Villains and the American National Identity from World War II to the War on TerrorJoanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen12. Tribalism and the Use of Evil in Modern PoliticsRiven Barton13. A “Fiend Incarnate”: Sin, Science, and the Problem of Evil in the New American NationJeffrey Mullins

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.