Heroes and VillainsHercules, Jesus, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, Frodo, Harry Potter, Buffy Summers, Spiderman, Batman, Captain Kirk, Dr. Who, Darth Vader, Sauron, Voldemort, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, the Daleks, the Borg. Almost anybody living in the developed West would be able to group these individuals into two camps: the heroes and the villains. However, what criteria they may use to do this is less clear. Mike Alsford introduces us to a range of heroic and villainous archetypes on a journey through film, television, comic books, and literature. On the way, he addresses questions such as: What is a true hero? What is a true villain? Have we misunderstood these terms? What kind of societal values do our mythical heroes and villains represent? In trying to understand the extremes of hero and villain we are made more aware of our own ethical standards and given a space in which to explore contemporary concerns over notions of right and wrong, good and bad. |
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... cultural values , aspirations and fears . What a culture considers heroic and what it considers villainous says a lot about that culture's underlying attitudes - attitudes that many of us may be unaware that we have , and which represent ...
... culture particularly , but not exclusively , since the Enlightenment . To do this I will be introducing philosophers such as Plato , Descartes and Kant , all of whom sought to estab- lish an absolute and primarily rational perspective ...
... cultural uniqueness and self- sufficiency , that folk sentiment meets with the intellectual ideas of its thinkers and ... culture , an extension of the German cultural ideal . Ernst Nolte points out that ' To Villains , Monsters and Evil ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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