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The monograph Hero – Antihero – Superhero – No-hero in the Cultural Space of the Past and the Present is a follow- up, in terms of outline, to two existing electronic books: Identity: Construction, Subversion, Absence (Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2014) and Utopia/Dystopia: Forms – Changes – Borders (Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2015). These publications emerged from working meetings of members of the research development programme at Charles University (PRVOUK), no. 9 Literature and Arts in Intercultural Communication. Authors who contributed to this book focus, in a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, on problems of literature and other kinds of cultural production from the earliest periods up to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty- first century (music, theatre, film, comics). The main topic is the tendency to complicate narratives and fictional worlds by configurations of diverse characters which no longer need clear ethical or narrative determination. At the same time, however, this tendency produces a contradictory trend: the need to emphasize a specific ethical status or action of a certain character. The present book discusses distinctive and productive types expressed by the four categories mentioned in the title (e.g., romantic hero; superfluous man; man without qualities; superhero; etc.), both in relation to the cultural context of the given period, and in terms of the linear development of the specific hero type. The book is divided into four parts. The first delineates the historical paradigm of the topic and focuses on the historical context of myth and its literary transformation. In her study “Hero as a Literary Character”, Sylva Fischerová (Department of Greek and Latin Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University) proposes a unique way of reading Homeric texts, different from previous modern interpretations. Her approach is based on religious studies and the view of the set of Greek heroes and their specific features, respecting the plot twists, nuances, and context of both poems. In the author's view, this method presents a more adequate approach to the heroes of the epic poems in comparison with previous scholarship. In the chapter entitled “I, the Hero…: Individuality and Heroic Self-Reflection in Old Norse Pre-Mortal Songs”, Jiří Starý (Department of Germanic Studies) focuses on pre- mortal songs and Eddic elegies, which differ from the extensive corpus of Old Norse heroic songs in two remarkable ways: by their self- reflexivity and their retrospective outlook (the hero recounts his life which is just about to end). The author proves that in contrast to the epic descriptiveness of other heroic songs which show us how the hero appears to the rest of the world, these poems tell us how the hero perceives himself. This argument has also a noteworthy gender aspect: while in pre- mortem songs the narrator is always male, Eddic elegies have only women narrators, namely partners and mothers of the heroes, who of course see the brutal world of heroic acts from a completely different perspective. The second part develops questions related to literary and cultural movements in European literatures in the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century. The part opens with a study by Martin Procházka (Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures) entitled “Byron and the Modern Epic – Facts, Fiction, and the Hero in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan”. The author attempts to interpret the heroes and subjectivity in Byron's two most important epic works from the perspective of relationship between facts and fiction (based on theories of fiction by Hans Vaihinger, Nelson Goodman, and Wolfgang Iser). The study moves from political and cultural implications of historical facts to reflecting on fictitiousness and even spectrality of the heroes and heroines, and interprets the transformation of values rep |
