Abstract
As W. H. Auden suggests in the quotation above, 1 it is in the hero figure, a dramatic extreme of the human condition, that important issues, such as existence and essence, thought and action, creativity and morality, are presented most vividly. This paper is an attempt to examine some of the more salient features of the nature of the hero.
What is a hero? The exceptional individual. How is he recognized, whether in life or in books? By the degree of interest he arouses in the spectator or the reader. A comparative study, therefore, of the kinds of individuals which writers in various periods have chosen for their heroes often provides a useful clue to the attitudes and preoccupations of each age,...the hero and his story are simultaneously a stating and a solving of the problem . . . .
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Notes
W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 83.
See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1965).
The W. B. Yeats line is from ‘Among School Children’; the Stevens quote from ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War.’ To eliminate myriad footnotes for the various works cited in this essay, I shall identify, parenthetically in the text, the work and its author (the exception being translated works). When no source is indicated, the quotation is understood to be taken from the work identified in the preceding notation.
‘Guy Faux: The Same Subject Continued,’ a review from the Examiner,November 18, 1821.
The translation cited throughout is that of Sir Richard C. Jebb, the one with which Virginia Woolf worked.
See Heroic Love: Studies in Sidney and Spenser by Mark Rose (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction,trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
Auden believes heroic authority “over the average” is of three kinds: “aesthetic, ethical, and religious” (The Enchafed Flood. p. 83).
Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1964).
In a recent book, Ellen Moers coined the awkward word heroinism “ because I could find nothing else in English to serve for the feminine of the heroic principle” (Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1976)). I have been using the word heroin a gender free manner—as, for example, mankind—to signify the hero of either sex, and use it now to indicate both the aesthetic and active aspects of woman as hero.
Carolyn Heilbrun, ‘The Woman as Hero,’ Texas Quarterly 8 (1965), 134.
Cf. Woolf’s September 7, 1924, entry in the Writer’s Diary. “It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles.”
‘A Sketch of the Past,’ in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings,ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 73.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies,trans. Stephen Spender and J. B. Leishman (New York: Norton Lirbary, 1963), The First Elegy,’ lines 40-41, p. 23.
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© 1982 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Schlack, B.A. (1982). Heroism and Creativity in Literature: Some Ethical and Aesthetic Aspects. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7720-4_18
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