Imaginations of Evil

Why does literary imagination make a pact with evil? Artists everywhere have always been attracted by the sphere of violence, horror and war, yet all attempts to define evil, from a historical-philosphical viewpoint, simply as the absence of good, have failed. This book does not examine evil from a philosophical or moral perspective, but shows how the aesthetic fascination of evil has, undeniably, been an integral part of literature at least since the Romantic era. It cannot be waived away by idealistic discourses, for aesthetics and evil are inter-related.

This book assembles Karl Heinz Bohrer's thoughts on the imaginings of evil that, for him, are less a reflection of social sensibility than an independent aesthetic category.