ANALYSES OF SACRIFICE IN LITERATURE treated it for a long time as a unified phenomenon, in which sacrifice is always the manifestation of a particular kind of violence. The most prominent example of this approach is that of René Girard, whose idea that every sacrifice is an example of a universal scapegoat mechanism has inspired many readings of sacrifice in literature. As in Freud's discussion of the death drive in Civilization and Its Discontents, Girard assumes that violence and aggression naturally build up in human society in the form of the “mimetic violence” that arises through uncontrollably escalating rivalry. Mimetic violence ends only when all aggression is channeled against one innocent scapegoat, who is sacrificed. While this approach has maintained a sense of the continuing importance of sacrifice for all human cultures, the focus on sacrifice as itself an expression of violence rather than an attempt to structure the human relationship to violence has meant that this theory has tended to read all sacrifice as both irrationally violent and structurally identical.

More recent theories of sacrifice have attempted to offer a more nuanced perspective, first by recognizing the positive aspects of sacrifice and second by differentiating between various structures of sacrifice in the separate manifestations. Jan-Melissa Schramm's study of Victorian fiction sees stories of sacrifice as examples of the attempt to construct an ideology of the nation and at the same time a basis for creating a general substitution of the self for the victim in a way that creates a bond of empathy. Describing the notion of sacrifice in France, Ivan Strenski contends that “there can be no durable social life—much less a ‘nation’—without sacrifice and the transcendent sanctions embodied in it,” and he demonstrates that Catholic understandings of sacrifice in France were not eliminated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but were revised to fit into nationalist conceptions of collective identity. Similarly, Yael Feldman shows how narratives of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible were transformed in the twentieth century through secular interpretations that linked them to a new Israeli nationalism. These studies move toward a theory of sacrifice that treats it, not so much as an affirmation of violence, as a means of establishing a collective understanding of the human relationship to death.