Resumen de Villains and heroes, or villains as heroes?: essays on the relationship between villainy and evil
Luke Seaber (coord.)
What constitutes a villain? How does villainy differ from evil? Is Captain Hook a villain - or is Peter Pan? Do portrayals of villainy from places as far apart as the Yemen, Italy and Ireland show common characteristics? Do villains created for children s fiction differ from those created for adults? This volume attempts to answer these questions and more; it also presents an overview of various directions within this field of study. The villains considered in this volume come from a stimulatingly eclectic range of sources. The media examined range from comic books to film and from novels to television serials; the narratives in their various forms come from a broad selection of times and places. Equally wide-ranging, too, is the degree of academic canonicity of the works in question: from the Babylon 5 franchise to the Matrix films and from a book as extensively studied as Nineteen Eighty-Four to one as little-known as Michael Baggett s Soapstone. This volume should not be seen as the end of a process but rather as a stage in one still on-going: villains fascinate us as readers and spectators, but they also continue to intrigue as objects of study, raising troubling questions about the role of narrative both in both fiction and real life.
