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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... novel La nouvelle Heloise in 1761. Maurice Cranston writes of this work : The message of the novel was seen as a liberating one ; that the imagination need no longer be the slave of reason , that feelings should not be suppressed ...
... novel and video game even today . We shall return to this point later . It should concern us greatly when , for example , political leaders institute foreign and domestic policy founded upon nothing more than their own will and ...
... novel , depicting the Batman and the Joker laughing maniacally together over a joke , serves to reinforce the notion of similarity between the two of them . Richard Reynolds makes this point : What makes Batman so different from ...
Contents
Myth and Imagination | 1 |
Heroes and Otherness | 23 |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility | 63 |
Copyright | |
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