Word: villainizing
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...Bedroom, by P. G. Wodehouse. Yet another out-of-plumb castle in the air, designed by the old master, this one inhabited by a tiddly young aristoclot named Freddy Widgeon, and besieged by a villain named Oofy Prosser...
...Trollope's Trendelssohn--is explained by Rosenberg: "The chief reason . . . is that [the good Jew] has been almost consistently a product of far too obvious and explicit ulterior motives. He bore from the first the pale cast of after-thought. Given the convention, the authors who kept the Jew-villain in circulation created their man with a good deal of spontaneity. The Jew-villain might not be a realistic figure; but within the canons of comedy and melodrama he could give the illusory appearance of being a creature of flesh and blood. The purveyors of the immaculate...
From Shylock to Svengali is a complete, sensitive, well written and valuable work. The only question which Rosenberg does not take up is why the Shylock myth has managed to persist. What repressed fears is society acting out in its persistent creation of the knife bearing villain? Rosenberg says, "I am aware . . . that literary conventions can tell us only so much about a subject which is, as bottom, impenetrable...
From blurb to backflap, P. G. never misses a Wodehouse trick. His names ("Oofy" Prosser is the villain, J. Sheringham Adair is the private eye) are felicitously goofy. His "floaters" ("I wouldn't kiss her with a ten-foot pole!") are a caution. His puns ("A fete worse than death") are outrageous. His hyperbole ("Carpets of so thick a nap that midgets would get lost in them and have to be rescued by dogs") is ingenious. His clichés ("The shot's not on the board, old dear") click with an exquisite remoteness in the modern...
There are other economic aid programs already working that have apparently been forgotten by all but their most despairing critics. Point Four, the brilliantly conceived technical assistance program that plays the villain in The Ugly American, badly needs a boost. More important, it needs a staff, and a well-paid professional staff at that. Public Law 480, which authorizes agricultural surplus disposal overseas, must die or wrench itself free of the innumerable squallings that arise when the U.S. subverts the International market by shipping free wheat to India...