Sin and Evil

A needed and timely book on sin and evil, and how they have been discussed and represented in Western literature from antiquity to the present day The confusion of sin and evil, or religious and moral transgression, is the subject of Ronald Paulsons latest book. He calls attention to the important distinction between sin and Evil (with a capital E) 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, Paulson focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sinand evil and sinful behaviorhave been discussed and represented. The breadth of Paulsons discussion is enormous, taking the reader from Greek and Roman tragedy, to Christian satire in the work of Swift and Hogarth, to Hawthornes and Melvilles novels, and finally to twentieth-century studies of good and evil by such authors as James, Conrad, Faulkner, Greene, Heller, Vonnegut, and OBrien. Where does evil come from? What are moral values? If evil is a cultural construct, what does that imply? Paulsons literary tour of sin and evil over the past two hundred years provides not only a historical perspective but also new ways of thinking about important issues that characterize our own era of violence, intolerance, and war.