What constitutes a villain? How does villainy differ from evil? Do villains created for children's fiction differ from those created for adults? The villains considered in this volume come from an eclectic range of sources - from comic books to film and from novels to television serials - and a broad selection of times and places. Villains continue to raise troubling questions about the role of narrative in both fiction and real life.

One dimensional television characters are a thing of the past--today's popular shows feature intricate storylines and well developed characters. From the brooding Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries to the tough-minded Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, protagonists are not categorically good, antagonists often have relatable good sides, and heroes may act as antiheroes from one episode to the next. This collection of new essays examines the complex characters in Orange Is the New Black, Homeland, Key & Peele, Oz, Empire, Breaking Bad, House, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This collection of essays explores the representations, incarnations and manifestations of evil when it is embodied in a particular villain or in an evil presence. All the essays contribute to showing how omnipresent yet vastly under-studied the phenomena of the villain and evil are. Together they confirm the importance of the continued study of villains and villainy in order to understand the premises behind the representation of evil, its internal localized logic, its historical contingency, and its specific conditions.

Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.

Hercules, Jesus, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, Frodo, Harry Potter, Buffy Summers, Spiderman, Batman, Captain Kirk, Dr. Who, Darth Vader, Sauron, Voldemort, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, the Daleks, the Borg. Almost anybody living in the developed West would be able to group these individuals into two camps: the heroes and the villains. However, what criteria they may use to do this is less clear. Mike Alsford introduces us to a range of heroic and villainous archetypes on a journey through film, television, comic books, and literature. On the way, he addresses questions such as: What is a true hero? What is a true villain? Have we misunderstood these terms? What kind of societal values do our mythical heroes and villains represent? In trying to understand the extremes of hero and villain we are made more aware of our own ethical standards and given a space in which to explore contemporary concerns over notions of right and wrong, good and bad.

This book gathers contributions on the topic of astrology in the West during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from 1914–2022. It is the first collection exclusively devoted to a period that has been mostly neglected by historians of astrology, who have mostly devoted themselves to the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. Uninterested in vindicating or debunking astrology, contributors consider its cultural impact, its relation to historical events, and the ways in which it has changed in the last century. The broad range of subjects on modern Europe and the US include the relation of astrology with indigenous thought, interwar Polish astrology, and the relation of American astrologers to COVID. A bibliography of studies of modern astrology on a global basis is also included. This collection is a thoughtful contribution to the history of astrology and the sociology of belief as well as carrying significant implications for twentieth and twenty-first century history broadly.

This volume explores the changing nature of gender and love in the twenty-first century from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.