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Offering a holistic take on an emerging field, this edited collection examines how heroism manifests, is appropriated, and is constructed in a broad range of settings and from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. Psychologists, educators, lawyers, researchers and cultural analysts consider how heroism intersects with wellbeing, and how we still use—and even abuse—heroism as a vehicle to thrive and prosper in the everyday and in the face of the most unbearable situations. Highlighting some of the most pressing issues in today’s world—including genocide, racism, deceitful business practices, bystanderism, mental health, unethical governance and the global refugee crisis—this book applies a critical psychological perspective in synthesizing the social construction of heroism and wellbeing, contributing to the development of global wellbeing indicators and measures.
Shares facts and anecdotes about men who are heroes and role models, from Abraham Lincoln and Robert Gould Shaw to Jesse Owens and Neil Armstrong.
The book examines examples of outstanding courage exhibited by people living in modern Britain. These include British servicemen and servicewomen serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, police officers, and ordinary civilians in Britain and around the world. All of the cases cited have been awarded gallantry medals by the British government since 2000.The purpose of the book is to inspire modern British people. In the past, the heroes of Empire were well-known and respected, but since the Second World War people have tended to associate heroism with celebrity instead. We hear footballers and actors described as heroes, and this demeans the word, and the real heroes of modern British society. The generations that fought the First and Second World Wars have often been held up as the greatest generations of British people. This book shows Britons that the kind of grit, determination, courage and willingness to have a go exhibited by previous generations are as alive now as they ever were, and heroes can come from all walks of life and all ethnic groups in modern Britain.
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 is not a self-help book. Its purpose is to not to show us how to apply the lessons of a hero's life in our own. Rather, it is a theoretical book, explaining what heroes are and why mankind needs them. Before we can emulate heroes, we must properly identify them, we must understand who and what they are....And what they are not. This is a matter of life and death. Some persons, for example, at various times have considered as heroes Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Osama bin Laden. If we are to promote human life, it is necessary for us to clearly understand that and why mass murderers are definitively excluded from the echelon of heroes. Chapters One, Two, and Three focus on the nature and definition of a hero, and provide a method for distinguishing a hero from non-heroes. Chapter Four raises the question of whether, under appropriate circumstances, everyman and everywoman can rise to heroic heights--and answers in the affirmative. Chapters Five, Six, and Seven dispute the time-honored notion that heroism involves self-sacrifice and demonstrate, rather, that heroism, properly understood, involves actions self-fulfilling; heroism and self-sacrifice are, in fact, moral antipodes. Chapter Eight discusses an appropriate response to morally flawed heroes--and Chapter Nine explains the errors of the modern antihero mentality. Finally, Chapter Ten shows the life-giving importance of hero worship. The two appendices validate philosophic principles that underlie the theory of heroes elucidated here: That human life is the standard of moral value and that human beings possess free will. This book does not purport to be an exhaustive analysis of a hero's nature. Presumably, there is more to be said. But it is a provocative first step toward understanding the nature of heroes, one that will hopefully spark a lively 21st century debate of this important subject.
The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.
What if saving the world was good for you? That’s my promise in The Happy Hero. That you can be happier and healthier simply by making a difference to the world around you. I call this formula ‘positive+action’, and after decades of researching, writing about and living positive+action I’ve become convinced this the answer to enjoying a better life. I want to tell you stories of the people who have already discovered this secret. And set out the principles for how to feel good by doing good. Which sounds simple. Except that there’s so much that needs to change, where do you even start? Everyday our media finds another international crisis or health scare, another predator or disaster. We are subject to an overwhelming barrage of fear and negativity each time we open our phones or switch on the TV. We have been trained out of happiness by these stories and turned into the victims of our own lives rather than the heroes. The Happy Hero will offer a simple solution: stop worrying about the world and start making it better. Because new research shows that trying to make a difference, even in the smallest ways, can extend your life, improve your relationships and even help you recover from a cold! And luckily, many of the changes we need to make to build a better world, we should want to do anyway. In The Happy Hero I’ll share the emerging evidence of how heroism can make you happy. I’ll also provide practical examples for getting started. This book will even take on the most intractable and complicated problem facing all of us: climate change. And we’ll discover how solving it will solve so much more. The UK’s top medical journal recently reported that the best way to protect your heart and slim your waistline is to count the carbon rather than calories in your food. The US Military insists that renewable energy will make our countries energy independent and help reduce conflict by providing cheaper sources of power to the poorest. In our own lives, we know that saving energy simply saves money. Together we can cut even huge challenges like climate change down to size. And every step and every action will come with their own reward.
Hercules is a hero; we were all brought up to appreciate the basic idea of the ancient hero. But what about him makes him one? This book aims to challenge some of the standard expectations as to what constitutes a hero, considering the phenomenon of heroism from a range of viewpoints. In this book we invite you to walk around the monumental notions of the hero and heroism, and endeavour to reach out and touch them on all sides. The chapters in this volume testify to the difficulty of answering the question ‘what is a hero?’ and engage with a variety of themes in attempting to offer some replies. They demonstrate not just the variety of ways in which the protagonists of ancient literature can be deemed heroic, but also the tendency for aspects of heroism to turn sour once identified. It seems that the moment we recognise heroic features, we are forced to question them. Do heroes necessitate anti-heroes, for example? Portraying protagonists’ heroic qualities in an ambigous light focuses the reader’s attention on the problem of realising the ideals of heroism in historic actuality. Various chapters ask the rhetorical question of whether we should expect, or more importantly, desire historical actors to behave like mythical heroes. To what extent can a hero ever be integrated into normal society? What difference might there be between a tragic and an epic hero? The commonplace ‘The only good hero is a dead hero’ summarises the extent to which this book also focuses on heroic death and dying. Covering Euripides to Monty Python, Roman soldiers to the modern military, this volume offers the reader a chance to think about the changing notion of the hero and recognise heroic qualities throughout western culture.
The cultural politics of commemorating war.