Papers from the 1st Global Villains and Villainy Conference, organised in September 2009 by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, at Mansfield College, Oxford.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- Villains in Our Mind: A Psychological Approach to Literary and Filmic Villainy / Enrique Cámara Arenas -- The Silent Villain: The Minimalist Construction of Patriarchal Villainy in John Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy / Sara Martin -- The Nazi’s Villain and the Holocaust / Dana Lori Chalmers -- ‘Wait till they get a load of me! ’: The Joker from Modern to Postmodern Villainous S/laughter / Sorcha Ní Fhlainn -- Little Red Riding Hood: Transition from Victim to Villain / Cynthia Jones -- ‘Can They Bear the Name Englishmen?’ The Celebrity of Motor Bandits as a ‘New Breed of Villain’ in the 1920s / Jo Chipperfield -- Historicising Racialised Objects of Horror: From the Black Renaissance Villain to the Voodoo Doer / Anna Fahraeus -- Representations of In-law Women as Villains in the Turkish Novel / Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu -- From Evil to Evil: Revisiting Ravana as a Tool for Community Building / Anita Shukla -- Who can Find a Virtuous CTU Agent? Jack Bauer as Modern Hero, Antihero and Tragic Villain / Monika Bokiniec.

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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.