CLSG Autumn conference 2011
Corpus Christi College
Oxford

Qualities of Heroism

About Heroism
Strength, virtue and bravery have long characterised the subjects of narrative. If protagonists surmount threats, or survive danger, we are inclined to ascribe the triumph to their heroism. When stories veer into realism, antiheroes receive the attention formerly reserved for gods and heroes.

The gospels are an enquiry into the heroism of their subject. Their opening unstated question is whether there was anything heroic in one who walked open-eyed into an avoidable death? Soon resurrection and a new interpretation of Jesus’ heroism was found, and it was seen that he fulfilled a hidden paradigm, Messiahship. A succession of martyrs would bear witness to the same interpretation.

Some references
Jorge Luis Borges, ’Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ in Ficciones, 1944
Norman T Burns and Christopher Reagan (eds.), Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1976
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, 1841
Leo Carruthers (ed.), Heroes in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift, D S Brewer, 1994
Gordon Haim, Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene, 1997
Stephanie S. Halldorson, The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo, 2007
Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life, 1973
Michael P Jones, Conrad’s Heroism, 1985,
E.L Risden, Heroes, Gods and the Role of Epiphany in English Epic Poetry, North Carolina, McFarland, 2008
Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Studies in Heroic Virtue, 1978
Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson and J.R.R. Tolkien, 1973
Evans Lansing Smith, The Hero Journey in Literature: Parables of Poesis, 1997
John Steadman, Milton and the Paradoxes of Renaissance Heroism, c. 1987
Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, 1981
James D Wilson, The Romantic Heroic Ideal, 1982.

Conference programme