Dissertation
(in progress)

What do we mean when we call someone, or something, "evil"?

My research examines how American literature reflects changing cultural understandings of evil from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. While scholars have extensively documented the rise of secularism in the modern West, my dissertation argues that popular literary texts offer an important lens through which to understand this transformation. Focusing on authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, and Flannery O'Connor, I trace the movement from a predominantly theological conception of evil toward explanations rooted in evolutionary theory and psychology. By reading these literary works alongside broader intellectual and cultural developments, I demonstrate how fiction both mirrors and shapes changing assumptions about human nature, morality, and responsibility.

The project is organized around four major literary figures, each representing a distinct moment in this intellectual history. Hawthorne's fiction explores a world in which evil remains fundamentally theological, even as Transcendentalist thought begins to challenge traditional Christian assumptions. Frank Norris's naturalism reimagines evil through Darwinian ideas of instinct and animality, while Mark Twain's realism increasingly interprets human wrongdoing through psychological rather than theological frameworks. Finally, Flannery O'Connor's twentieth-century fiction revisits theological understandings of evil, suggesting that modern secular explanations alone cannot fully account for the deepest dimensions of human violence and moral failure.
 

Ultimately, my dissertation – From Devil to Diagnosis: American Literature and the Secularization of Evil – argues that the changing literary portrayal of evil reveals a broader cultural shift with lasting consequences for contemporary society. As theological language receded from American intellectual life, literature increasingly adopted alternative frameworks for explaining human wrongdoing. While these new models offered important insights, they also left behind concepts that had long provided a vocabulary for understanding profound moral and existential questions. By recovering this literary history, my research contributes to conversations in American literature, religious studies, and intellectual history, while offering a new perspective on how changing narratives of evil continue to shape the way we interpret the modern world.