From Richard to Adolf: political monsters as literary villains

Representing evil is one of the main issues of contemporary art, but it also raises relevant questions about the relationship between art and morality, literature and politics. Although the literary tradition has dealt with the representation of evil in many different ways (as Shakespearean villains such as Richard III or Macbeth remind us), the contemporary consciousness sharpened by the full revelation of the Shoah and other examples of mass destruction reverberates in many contemporary fictional works.