Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Ranging widely through the history of Western literature, Paulson focuses particularly on American and English works of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries to discover how questions of evil and sin - and evil and sinful behavior - have been discussed and represented. The breadth of Paulson's discussion is enormous, taking the reader from Greek and Roman tragedy, to Christian satire in the work of Swift and Hogarth, to Hawthorne's and Melville's novels, and finally to twentieth-century studies of good and evil by such authors as James, Conrad, Faulkner, Greene, Heller, Vonnegut, and O'Brien."--Jacket.

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