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When it comes to crime, everyone seems to take evil seriously as an explanatory concept - except criminologists. This book asks why, and why not, through exploring a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to evil from the perspectives of theology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and the social sciences.

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Preface 1. Theodicy: Understanding the Problem of Evil 2. Enter the Evil Genius: Encountering Metaphysical Evil 3. Radical Freedom, Radical Evil? Kant´s Theory of Evil and the Failure of Theodicy 4. Telling Evil Stories: Understanding Cultural Narratives and Symbols of Evil in the Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur 5. ´Something to be scared of´ - Evil, the Feminine and Psychoanalytic Theory 6. Evil and Literature: Love and Liberation 7. Doing Evil: Crime, Compulsion, Seduction from the Standpoint of Social Psychology and Anthropology 8. The Banality of Evil: Genocide, Slavery, Holocaust, War 9. The Axis of Evil - the War on Terror, the ´Enemy Within´ and the Politics of Evil and the State 10. Book Summary and Touching the Void or Looking Through a Glass Darkly? Evil and Criminology

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Melissa Dearey is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull, UK. Her teaching and research interests focus on interdisciplinary theories of crime, deviance and evil, green criminology and competing public and academic explanations of crime.

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