Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

(although one would have welcomed a clear statement on which “good” narratives he thinks overcome the moral relativism of the more exploitative texts). Overall, the excess of evil in literature seems to flourish particularly in postmodern poetics and in American culture. True, Puschmann-Nalenz touches on some texts, but in general there is a paucity of “Anglophone”, i.e. non-American, nonEnglish literature in the volume. Surely Irish literature would have produced wonderful material, and the missing case of Martin McDonagh also points to a second blind spot in the collection: the almost complete absence of theatre and drama. Kathleen Starck addresses issues of ethnicity in her essay on the demonization of black male characters in American film. She singles out a somewhat predictable target, The Birth of a Nation, and compares it unfavourably with Richard Wright’s Native Son. Ethnicity is also the focus of Jutta Ernst’s contribution on Native American fiction that, interestingly, does not seem to conclude with a unifying, specific stance on evil in her texts. As the editors concede in their introduction, the concept of evil is so versatile and blurry that it embraces a vast, potentially unlimited territory, uncharted even in this rich volume, between resurgent moral binaries, an entanglement of good and evil, a variety of psycho-social analyses of evil that are so frequent in literature and the acceptance of a residual degree of inexplicable autonomy in evil. All in all, this is an intelligent and inspiring edition, prepared, with few exceptions, to generally high editorial standards. Its diversity, however, may compromise its usefulness as an “introductory survey of the phenomenon of evil in Anglophone literatures and cultures” (6), a claim made in the introduction.