Sin and Evil : Moral Values in Literature

by Ronald Paulson

• ISBN13: 9780300120141
• ISBN10: 0300120141
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2007-03-28
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The confusion of sin and evil, or religious and moral transgression, is the subject of Ronald Paulson's latest book. He calls attention to the important distinction between sin and Evil (with a capital E) that in our times is largely ignored, and to the further confusion caused by the term "moral values." Ranging widely through the history of Western literature, Paulson focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sinand evil and sinful behaviorhave been discussed and represented. The breadth of Paulson's discussion is enormous, taking the reader from Greek and Roman tragedy, to Christian satire in the work of Swift and Hogarth, to Hawthorne's and Melville's novels, and finally to twentieth-century studies of good and evil by such authors as James, Conrad, Faulkner, Greene, Heller, Vonnegut, and O'Brien. Where does evil come from? What are "moral values"? If evil is a cultural construct, what does that imply? Paulson's literary tour of sin and evil over the past two hundred years provides not only a historical perspective but also new ways of thinking about important issues that characterize our own era of violence, intolerance, and war.

Author Biography

Ronald Paulson is Emeritus Professor of English, The Johns Hopkins University, and author of more than twenty previous books, including Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, published by Yale University Press.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Evil, Sin, and Wrongdoing	p. 1
Evil	p. 1
Sin	p. 5
Wrongdoing	p. 21
Classical and Christian Equivalents of Sin and Evil	p. 34
Greece and Rome	p. 34
Christian Satire	p. 45
Church of England Satire: Swift, A Tale of a Tub	p. 53
Sin and Evil Redefined: The Enlightenment	p. 69
The Popular Stage	p. 69
Graphic Imagery	p. 81
The Aesthetics of Sin	p. 92
The Aesthetics of Evil	p. 106
Sin/Evil and the Law: The Novel	p. 124
Fielding	p. 124
Dickens	p. 138
Hawthorne and Melville	p. 147
The Demonizinc of Sin	p. 161
"Sin With the Capital Letter": The Supernatural	p. 161
The Supernatural and Moral Values: Henry James	p. 175
Demonic and Banal Evil	p. 192
Demonic Doubles	p. 192
Those Who Burn and Those Who Rot: Conrad	p. 211
Popeye and Gowan Stevens: Faulkner	p. 224
Pinkie Brown and Ida Arnold: Graham Greene	p. 236
The Original Evil and the Original Sin	p. 253
Doing-Evil	p. 253
Suffering-Evil	p. 264
Coping with Evil	p. 281
Modern Sin and Evil	p. 301
Ideology	p. 301
War	p. 313
Holocaust	p. 329
Notes	p. 347
Index	p. 389
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