This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.

This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.

This reference work is an important resource in the growing field of heroism studies. It presents concepts, research, and events key to understanding heroism, heroic leadership, heroism development, heroism science, and their relevant applications to businesses, organizations, clinical psychology, human wellness, human growth potential, public health, social justice, social activism, and the humanities. The encyclopedia emphasizes five key realms of theory and application: Business and organization, focusing on management effectiveness, emotional intelligence, empowerment, ethics, transformational leadership, product branding, motivation, employee wellness, entrepreneurship, and whistleblowers; clinical-health psychology and public health, focusing on stress and trauma, maltreatment, emotional distress, bullying, psychopathy, depression, anxiety, family disfunction, chronic illness, and healthcare workers’ wellbeing; human growth and positive psychology, discussing altruism, authenticity, character strengths, compassion, elevation, emotional agility, eudaimonia, morality, empathy, flourishing, flow, self-efficacy, joy, kindness, prospection, moral development, courage, and resilience; social justice and activism, highlighting anti-racism, anti-bullying, civil disobedience, civil rights heroes, climate change, environmental heroes, enslavement heroes, human rights heroism, humanitarian heroes, inclusivity, LGBTQ+ heroism, #metoo movement heroism, racism, sustainability, and women’s suffrage heroes; and humanities, relating to the mythic hero’s journey, bliss, boon, crossing the threshold, epic heroes, fairy tales, fiction, language and rhetoric, narratives, mythology, hero monomyth, humanities and heroism, religious heroes, and tragic heroes.

Home front heroism investigates how civilians were recognised and celebrated as heroic during the Second World War. Through a focus on London, this book explores how heroism was manufactured as civilians adopted roles in production, protection and defence, through the use of uniforms and medals, and through the way that civilians were injured and killed. This book makes a novel contribution to the study of heroism by exploring the spatial, material, corporeal and ritualistic dimensions of heroic representations. By tracing the different ways that home front heroism was cultivated on a national, local and personal level, this study promotes new ways of thinking about the meaning and value of heroism during periods of conflict. It will appeal to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of Second World War as well as the sociology and psychology of heroism.

Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.

This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its responses to crisis and change. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, this book’s analyses show how heroisation in television drama reacts to, and reveals shifts in, British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity. The book is ideal for readers interested in British cultural studies, studies of the heroic and popular culture. Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution (CC-BY-)] 4.0 license.

This book fills a remarkable void in literary studies which has escaped the attention of many researchers. It interrogates the extent to which nineteenth-century children’s adventure novels justify and perpetuate the British Imperialist ideology of the period. In doing so, it begins with providing a historical background of children’s literature and nineteenth-century British imperialism. It then offers a theoretical framework of postcolonial reading to decipher the colonial discourse employed in the selected children’s adventure novels. As such, the book offers postcolonial readings of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), W.H.G. Kingston’s In the Wilds of Africa (1871), and H.R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It will appeal to students, academicians and researchers in fields such as postcolonialism, children’s literature and British Imperialism.