Violence in literature
Having most likely started with cave drawings depicting humans, animals, and elements of nature in the preliterate age as far as 30,000 years ago, it has developed significantly with the use of spoken and written language.
Recognized as the most ancient of literary texts, The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2150 – 1400 BCE), discovered on clay tablets,[5] begins with its protagonist king, corrupted by power, incessantly abusing his people; killing men and assaulting women.
Yet of the most violent features in the epic is Achilles's manhandling of Hector's body in a display of the utter inhumanity of war; it is left to be mauled by dogs and scavenging birds, then stabbed by other Achaeans, only to be, at last, dragged around by his killer's chariot.
[citation needed] Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature mention various instances of natural calamities sent to penalize oppressors and sinners; the Red Sea, after being split by Moses to allow for his and his people's safe passage, floods the land and drowns Pharaoh's army.
[15] It quickly earned popularity in Europe, then America, and some of its notable contributors include Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Brockden Brown in the 18th century, then Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th.
For example, Manfred is throughout the novel mercilessly haunted by his grandfather's ghost, and several of his actions and decisions, especially those of violent nature, are driven by the constant fear of ancient magical prophecies.
[16] The novel's gothic aspects – gruesome violence, emotional abuse, mystic scenery, and details of setting such as medieval architecture, secret passages, and animated portraits – inspired contemporary and later authors to imitate, reform, and develop the genre.
[18] Within the gothic framework, Shelley therefore gave literary violence a new utility: it can be reflective of the flaws of human nature and society – a symbol for the emotional suffering caused by social neglect and injustice.
[citation needed] In "The Fall of the House of Usher", Poe instantly establishes a gothic setting: outside the old and decaying castle is a violent storm, and inside are mystifying damp rooms visited by the corpse of Madeline.
[20] As a precursor to horror genres popular today, gothic fiction in the Romantic and Victorian eras therefore employed violence that took on connotations beyond glory as in most epics and the spiritual purposes in religious literature.
Crime and detective fiction, for instance, though having been published earlier in the 19th century in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", saw heightened success in the period between the two world wars.
Hercule Poirot's Christmas ranks as one of her most violent volumes; its victim, multi-millionaire Simeon Lee, has his throat slit open and is left lying in a pool of blood inside his room with broken and flipped over furniture.
As it deals with imaginative futuristic scenarios, common themes in science fiction include extraterrestrial discoveries, space wars, time travelling, alternate realities, and technological advancements such as artificial intelligence.
[25] Notable contributors include Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury – and most of their writing maintains, if not magnifies, the types of physical and emotional violence encountered in past fiction.
Psychologist Steven Pinker claims that violence results from a lack of self-control,[33] and empirical research has shown that some people resort to aggressive behavior to relieve their stress; an attempt at emotion-regulation to attain a temporary but alleviating sense of self-agency.
Defined as the mass destruction of the environment through intentional or neglectful behavior,[35] ecocide by immoderate resource exploitation as well as human-caused climate change and life extinction is displayed not as a background event but the root cause of apocalyptic scenarios in modern speculative novels.
Octavia E. Butler's sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower, for instance, is set in a dystopian Earth suffering from constant droughts and rising floods following its people's persistent damaging of nature and subsequent contributions to global warming.
Such narratives have garnered the attention and support of nature advocates as they present a creative and popular medium, especially for young people, to establish an ecocritical discourse and raise awareness about human responsibility toward the environment.
Because the ego (the rational self) and superego (the self-critical conscience consisting of social and moral standards) work on suppressing desires, this repression creates an emotional disturbance that generates aggressive tendencies which, depending on the individual's temperament, is subdued with a variety of coping mechanisms.
Common defense strategies include denial (the refusal to accept the upsetting reality), displacement (the directing of anger toward people or things that feel unthreatening), and sublimation (the distracting of one's thoughts by engaging in physical or entertaining activity).
[39] Although the term graphic violence is commonly used for visual artistic media like film and television, it can relate to literature due to vivid, gory descriptions of death and injury in several stories.
In addition to the elaborate descriptions of the decaying, mutilated bodies of individuals affected by the plague, the suffering accompanying an infection and the subsequent transformation into a zombie, as well as the process of being eaten alive can be equally, if not more, unsettling for readers.
Aleksandar Hemon's short story "A Coin", told through letters sent by a journalist named Aida in Sarajevo to the narrator in Chicago, describes the horrors of the Bosnian 1990s war using explicit violence.
Another contributor to this interpretation is his apparent, unstable mental state; he is plagued with longing for Sarajevo and the isolation of immigration, and his deteriorating condition is displayed physically when he mercilessly kills then mutilates a cockroach.
A variety of literary characters appear to support this idea: Misery Annie Wilkes is believed to have bipolar disorder with manic psychosis,[46] and Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who is known to have decapitated African slaves and displayed their heads for decoration, is characterized by insanity.
Conrad's tale, though controversial with regards to its true purpose, exposes the violence that is part of a colonial system – a source of rape, assassination, human and natural exploitation, and other crimes.
Though Carl, the child, is left horrified with this behavior he is later reassured that it was done out of compassion – and readers similarly view this incident as Rick's most violent act yet of the strongest displays of protectiveness and love for his son.
[citation needed] In his Marxist reading of this narrative, Kosenko (1985) postulates that the violence therein is an attack on capitalism; Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery, represents an oppressive authority whereas the townspeople are the weak under his control.
It is possible that Mr. Summers knows which paper possesses the black dot in order to keep his and other powerful families safe, meaning that the public is led to blindly believe in the democracy and fairness of the ritual when it was probably an act of discriminative selection.
A common concern among parents is that their kids may fail to differentiate fantasy from reality and that, realizing that the hero is praised for violently defeating the enemy, would believe this type of conduct to be acceptable or even recommended.
