Villains. Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today.

Genc Burcu, Lenhardt Corinna

Zusammenfassung

There are villains in fiction and they are versatile and plain, cunning and clumsy, beautiful and ugly, black and white and green and red, and they have the potential to be the personified pure evil; in other words, they show totally human characteristics. Villains blend in naturally with the environments from which they stem, while at the same time, they stand out as the socially harmful “Other”, which needs to be contained and overcome for the sake of normality and life. Villainy, it seems, is a matter of perspective, a matter of “us” versus “them”, “normal” versus “other”, and “life” versus “death”. The vital importance of the concept and the motif of “villain” and “villainy” for contemporary and past cultures around the world was explored and discussed in depth at the second global, interdisciplinary conference on Villains and Villainy which was held at Oriel College, Oxford in September 2010 as part of the research network Inter-Disciplinary.Net. Extraordinary scholars from around the world took the opportunity to share and discuss their insights into the subject from diverse backgrounds in numerous academic disciplines and research interests.