The Function of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts explores answers to two important questions about the age-old theme of evil: is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? By looking across several disciplines and analyzing evil as it is referenced across a broad spectrum of phenomena, this work demonstrates the varying ways that we interact with the ethical dilemma as academics, as citizens, and as people. The work draws from authors in different fields-including history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychology-and from around the world to provide an analysis of evil in such topics as deeply canonical as Beowulf and Shakespeare to subjects as culturally resonant as Stephen King, Captain America, or the War on Terror. By bringing together this otherwise disparate collection of scholarship, this collection reveals that discussions of evil across disciplines have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. This work thus opens the conversation about evil outside of field-specific limitations, simultaneously demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds.

The title of this volume illustrates the significance of margins and the instability of demarcation in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. The author approaches Ishiguro's writings as a corpus rather than separate units, examining the novels to illuminate their generic, theoretical or stylistic affiliations. The chapters attend to seemingly peripheral elements - trivial details, incoherent conversations, hackneyed notions, minor characters and everyday occurrences - in order to expose what is deliberately obscured or contained within the explicit narrative. The poststructuralist approach and the structuralist objective of this study may appear incongruous, but the seemingly incompatible pairing in fact articulates a number of paradoxes that Ishiguro's novels manifest: the alterity of the international, the disclosure of the concealed, the innovation of the banal, the significance of the trivial, the presence of the absent and the accord of the cacophonous.

The Functions of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts explores answers to two important questions about the age-old theme of evil: is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? By looking across several disciplines and analyzing evil as it is referenced across a broad spectrum of phenomena, this work demonstrates the varying ways that we interact with the ethical dilemma as academics, as citizens, and as people. The work draws from authors in different fields-including history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychology-and from around the world to provide an analysis of evil in such topics as deeply canonical as Beowulf and Shakespeare to subjects as culturally resonant as Stephen King, Captain America, or the War on Terror. By bringing together this otherwise disparate collection of scholarship, this collection reveals that discussions of evil across disciplines have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. This work thus opens the conversation about evil outside of field-specific limitations, simultaneously demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds.