This volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the perennial theme. For readers who are studying it for the first time, four essays survey the critical conversation regarding the theme, explore its cultural and historical contexts, and offer close and comparative readings of key texts in the genre. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the theme can then move on to other essays that explore it in depth through a variety of critical approaches. Works discussed include King Lear; Paradise Lost; Maus; The Scarlet Letter; Jane Eyre; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Farming of Bones; Train to Pakistan; Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

On good and evil -- Critical contexts : Good and evil in the modern critical tradition -- Good and evil: inclusion and exclusion in life and literature -- World without evil? Faust's fortunes through the centuries -- Decadence and Dorian Gray: who's afraid of Oscar Wilde? -- Critical readings : Bonds, needs, and morals in King Lear -- John Milton's Paradise lost and the problem of evil -- Driven by demons: "The rime of the ancient mariner" -- The inadequacy of closure in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; or, Why "Reader, I married him" is one of the most disappointing sentences in Victorian literature -- Hawthorne's pearl: the origins of good and evil in The scarlet letter -- "The accurst, the tainted, and the innocent": The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the fragmentation of personality in late Victorian and Edwardian Scottish fiction -- From mice to Mickey to Maus: the metaphor of evil and its metamorphosis in the Holocaust -- Understanding communal violence: Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan -- Unfinished evil and benevolent community in Edwidge Danticat's The farming of bones -- Revisiting the Gothic -- The touch of evil and the triumph of love in Harry Potter.