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During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil's Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one's nation and gods. However, Longinus'theory of the sublime – newly recovered during the Renaissance – contradicted this absolute devotion to nation as a marker of religious piety. Heroic Awe explores how Renaissance epic poetry used the sublime to challenge the assumption that epic heroism was primarily about civic duty and glorification of state. The book demonstrates how the significant investment of Renaissance epic poetry in Longinus'theory of the sublime reshaped the genre of epic. To do so, Kelly Lehtonen examines the intersection between the Longinian sublime and early modern Protestant and Catholic discourses in Renaissance poems such as the Gerusalemme Liberata, Les Semaines, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. In illuminating the role of Longinus along with that of religious discourses, Heroic Awe offers a new perspective on epic heroism in Renaissance epic poetry, redefining heroism as the capacity to be overwhelmed emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by encounters with divine glory. In considering the links between religion, the sublime, and epic, the book aims to shed new light on several core topics in early modern studies, including epic heroism, Renaissance philosophy, theories of emotion, and the psychology of religion.

Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism offers a fresh analysis of the nineteenth-century European novel, exploring the cultural images of Byron and Napoleon as they appear in the construction of ‘bourgeois heroism.'Utilising a unique pan-European perspective, this volume draws together concepts of heroism with theoretically informed questions of form, particularly the role of the hero-protagonist and development of literary realism. Observing Byron and Napoleon as parallel entities, whose rise and twin fame cast long shadows in the first decades of the nineteenth century, this text exemplifies the force of personality which made them heroes. Even where they were reviled, their commitment to challenging moribund cultural and social values make them touchstones for all those who attempted to understand the nineteenth century's modernity. Integrating the study of heroism in the nineteenth-century novel with key developments in critical theory, Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism is essential reading for students and scholars of the bourgeois hero, as well as those with a wider interest in nineteenth-century literature.

Heroism is usually associated with great deeds, and heroes are regarded as superior and powerful individuals who take action. This opinion has dominated Western tradition since ancient times. At the same, the ability to bide one's time was and is equally classed as a heroic quality because it is an ‘inner form of action'(M. Weber). Fabius Cunctator was heroicised for tactically biding his time during the Second Punic War, as were the front-line soldiers during the First World War, who held out for so long in the trenches. Moreover, the Christian notion of salvation, the heroic, eremitical act of waiting in this life for the next, or the prophetic, messianic constellations of the 1920s also spring to mind in this context.The essays collected in this book examine ‘heroic waiting'as a literary phenomenon. They not only provide in-depth analyses of how biding one's time is conveyed as a heroic act, but also focus above all on how it is staged. The book's introduction, which was written by the editors, is based on a collective set of descriptive tools with which ‘heroic waiting'can be defined and understood in terms of its typological characteristics on the one hand and as a relational structure on the other.

Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace are both works which defy attempts to assign them to a particular genre but might seem to have little else in common apart from being set in the same period of history. This study argues that there are important similarities between these two works and examines the close correspondence between Hardy's and Tolstoy's thinking on themes relating to war, ideas of the heroic and the concept of free will. Although coming from very different backgrounds, both writers were influenced by their experiences of war, Tolstoy directly, by involvement in the wars in the Caucasus and the Crimea, and Hardy indirectly, by the events of the Anglo-Boer Wars. Their reaction to these experiences found expression in their descriptions of the wars fought against Napoleon at the beginning of the century. Hegel saw Napoleon as the great world-historical man of his time, and this work considers the ways in which Hardy and Tolstoy undermine this view, portraying Napoleon's physical and mental decline and questioning the role he played in determining the outcomes of military actions. Both writers were deeply interested in the question of free will and determinism and their writings reveal their attempts to understand the nature of the force which lies behind men's actions. Their differing views on the nature of consciousness are considered in the light of modern research on the development of the conscious brain.

The figure of the American Adam is a prevalent mythin US cultural history. Defined by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 as'the hero of newadventure...an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling,ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique andinherent resources', the figure is discernable in the American renaissancewriters and in the imagery of the frontiersman, cowboy, gangster as well as inthe heroes of US action movies. Focusing on the American Adam as a paradigm of masculine identity formation,this monograph examines how this fantasy of an imaginary ideal identity has held an ideological sway over US identityin the main. Taking in a range of cultural texts, Jonathan Mitchell's study exploresthe complexities and contradictions of Adam's'real'condition of existence to showhow the paradigm influences both masculinity and subsequently hegemonic USidentity as represented throughout twentieth-century US culture.

Readers of Beowulf have noted inconsistencies in Beowulf's depiction, as either heroic or reckless. Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf resolves this tension by emphasizing Beowulf's identity as a foreign fighter seeking glory abroad. Such men resemble wreccan,'exiles'compelled to leave their homelands due to excessive violence. Beowulf may be potentially arrogant, therefore, but he learns prudence. This native wisdom highlights a king's duty to his warband, in expectation of Beowulf's future rule. The dragon fight later raises the same question of incompatible identities, hero versus king. In frequent reference to Greek epic and Icelandic saga, this revisionist approach to Beowulf offers new interpretations of flyting rhetoric, the custom of'men dying with their lord,'and the poem's digressions.