Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media

by Nizar Zouidi (Editor)

Overview

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030760571
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/25/2021
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	510
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nizar Zouidi is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Hail, Saudi Arabia, and at the University of Gafsa, Tunisia. Zouidi is the author of a number of book chapters and journal articles about the representations of evil in early modern drama.

Table of Contents

Section I: The (dis)embodiment of evil in medieval and Renaissance moments

1 Contours of an Inherent Frame: The Underpinnings of Evil in Everyman

Bibhash Choudhury

2 If You Only Knew: Mephistopheles, Master Mirror, and the Experience of Evil

Dustin Lovett

3 Recognizable Patterns of Evil in Muslim Characters in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Jeffrey McCambridge

4 Desiring Empire: The Colonial Violence of “Hijab Pornography”

Ibtisam M. Abujad

5 Villains of the High Seas: Apostasy and Piracy in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, the Anonymously Authored Captain Thomas Stukeley, and William Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk

Jared S. Johnson

Section II: Performing moral deformity in the Shakespearean moment

6 The Psychological Origins of Evil: The Trickster in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Hend Hamed

7 A Show of Illusions: Performing Villainous Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest & Macbeth

Lisann Anders

8 The Demon’s Amorous Looking Glass: Reflections on the Villain’s Performative Self-Fashioning in Richard III by William Shakespeare

Nizar Zouidi

9 “It is his hand”: Villainy through letters in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Twelfth Night

 Sélima Lejri

10 Villainy as a facet of Nietzsche’s Wirkliche Historie prefigured in Shakespeare’s Richard II and concretized in Brecht’s Man Equals Man and The Measures Taken

Mariem Khmiri

Section III: Language, race and the dehumanization of the evil other in (post)colonial moments

11 Tituba’s Stairway: Representations of Tituba in Historical and Fictional Texts

Danielle Legros Georges

12 Colonial ‘Idea’ and ‘Work’: The Evil in Marlow’s Heart of Darkness

Ahmet Süner

13 Caught in a Feudal Hang-Up: My Feudal Lord Mirroring a Villain and the Rebellion of a Pakistani Woman

Humaira Riaz

14 Good Versus Evil in Max’s Lucha Libre Adventures Series (2011-2020) by Xavier Garza

Amy Cummins

Section IV: Obsessed avengers, revenants and vampires in the British and American Romantic moments

15 Melville and Ford: Ahab and the Duke

John Price

16 Naught Beyond: A Phenomenology of Ahab’s “Madness Maddened”

Bill Scalia

17 Seductive Female Villains and Rhetoricians in The Monk and Zofloya; or, The Moor

 Hediye Özkan

18 Dressed to Kill: Manipulating Perceived Social Class Through the Con of Clothing in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction

Sabrina Paparella

19 Supernatural Doppelgangers: Manifestations of Villainy in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

 Tammie Jenkins

Section V: A world of dark secrets: Espionage, silent wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation in the post-World War moments

20 Debating ‘the Nuclear Evil’ in U.S. Nuclear Fiction

Inna Sukhenko

21 The Evil Gaze of the State and the Post-Human Interrogator in 1984

Sadok Bouhlila

22 Wicked Speech and Evil Acts: Performativity as Discourse and Murder as Responsibility in Curtain – Poirot’s Last Case (1975) and Speedy Death (1929)

Federica Crescentini

23 Host of Otherness: The Trope of the Urban Space Habitat and the Concept of Evil in Contemporary Science Fiction Media

Mark Filipowich

Section VI: Good criticism of evil art: Studying evil in revisionist academic and cultural moments

24 Busting Binaries: Beyond Evil in Youth Literature, a Consideration of Emezi’s Pet

 E. F. Schraeder

25 On the Performance of Villainy and Evil in Joker (2019)

Kelvin Ke Jinde

26 “Making Our Work of Art a Masterpiece”: The Aesthetics of Evil in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

 Brennan Thomas

27 Textual Evil and Performative Precarity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho

 Nicky Gardiner

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is a wide-ranging and innovative exploration of villainy that will be of interest to scholars of early modern drama, contemporary film and literature and everything in between.” (Kevin Corstorphine, Lecturer in American Literature, University of Hull, UK)