Good and Evil by Margaret Sonser BreenCall Number: PR 468 .G66 G66 2013
ISBN: 9781429837361
Publication Date: 2012-09-01
Good and evil is one of the great themes of literature. But what are good and evil, and how do we distinguish one from the other? Should we regard them as one and the same? Are they abstractions that help us to order our lives? Are they embodied: can people personify good or be evil? Are good and evil moral absolutes, or are they relative terms, historically and culturally determined? What is literature’s relationship to dominant cultural, political, and religious definitions of good and evil; how does literature encode these definitions or resist them? What, after all, can literature teach us? These are some of the questions that the sixteen essays in this volume ask.