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. |
From inside the book
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... hero , to engage with life in all its messy multi- facetedness , to recognise that the world cannot be made right simply by following a formula or a procedure . That nebulous intellectual and cultural movement known as Postmodernism ...
Mike Alsford. 2 The Outsider : Heroes and Otherness One of the characteristic marks of the hero is what we might call their transcendental status . That is to say the hero , while in a very real sense being part of the world and caught ...
... hero . His methods for extract- ing information are harsh and bloody and yet , it is hard not to view him as a hero . Part of this is due , I think , both to his motivation and his willingness to suffer in his quest for vengeance . Marv ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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