Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature
Ronald Paulson
Abstract
The confusion of sin and evil, or religious and moral transgression, is the subject of this book. It calls attention to the important distinction between sin and evil 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, the book focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sin, and evil and sinful behavior, have been discussed and represented. The book takes the reader from Greek and Roman traged ... More
The confusion of sin and evil, or religious and moral transgression, is the subject of this book. It calls attention to the important distinction between sin and evil 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, the book focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sin, and evil and sinful behavior, have been discussed and represented. The book takes 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?
Keywords:
sin,
evil,
religious transgression,
moral transgression,
moral values,
sinful behavior,
good and evil
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300120141 |
Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300120141.001.0001 |