Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction: Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction. Concepts and Conjunctures

   • Barbara Korte, Stefanie Lethbridge

   Pages 1-29

3. Negotiating Modernity, Modernising Heroes: Heroes and Heroines in Gothic and Sensation Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century

   • Stefanie Lethbridge

   Pages 31-46

4. Potentially the Noble Creature? Picturing Heroism in Henry Rider Haggard’s She

   • Alison E. Martin

   Pages 47-66

5. The Fate of Heroism After Industrialisation: The Working-Class Male in the British Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel and Beyond

   • Ralf Schneider

   Pages 67-84

6. Death of the Hero? Heroism in British Fiction of the First World War

   • Ann-Marie Einhaus

   Pages 85-100

7. “A Courage Steadfast, Luminous”: Christopher Caudwell and the Communist Hero

   • Anindya Raychaudhuri

   Pages 101-116

8. Unspeakable Heroism: The Second World War and the End of the Hero

   • Lucy Hall, Gill Plain

   Pages 117-134

9. Constructing and Deconstructing the Fantasy Hero: Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” Trilogy

   • Jochen Petzold

   Pages 135-150

10. An Unlikely Hero for the War-on-Terror Decade: Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights

    • Nicole Falkenhayner

    Pages 151-167

11. The Heroic in British Young Adult Fiction: Traditions and Renegotiations

    • Kristina Sperlich

    Pages 169-182

12. Victims and Heroes Get All Mixed Up: Gender and Agency in the Thriller

    • Barbara Korte

    Pages 183-198

13. Back Matter

    Pages 199-206

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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. 

• Victorian
• Contemporary
• Twentieth Century
• 9/11
• Fiction

• English Department, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

  Barbara Korte, Stefanie Lethbridge

Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature and British Culture at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is deputy speaker of the university’s collaborative research centre on ‘Heroes, Heroisation and Heroisms’ and is working on Victorian magazines in this context. Other areas of interest are travel writing and representations of history in popular media.


Stefanie Lethbridge is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is member of the university’s collaborative research centre on ‘Heroes, Heroisation and Heroisms’. She has published on British poetry anthologies since the Renaissance, on eighteenth-century and Victorian print culture, on sensation fiction and on representations of the heroic in popular culture.

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