Barbara Korte & Stefanie Lethbridge 
Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800 
Case Studies

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. 

Table of Content

1. Introduction: Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction – Concepts and Conjunctures; Barbara Korte and Stefanie Lethbridge.- 2. Negotiating Modernity: Heroes and Heroines in Gothic and Sensation Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century; Stefanie Lethbridge.- 3. Potentially the Noble Creature? Picturing Heroism in Henry Rider Haggard’s
She; Alison E. Martin.- 4. The Fate of Heroism after Industrialisation: The Working-Class Male in the British Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel and Beyond; Ralf Schneider.- 5. Death of the Hero? Heroism in British Fiction of the First World War; Ann-Marie Einhaus.- 6. “A Courage Steadfast, Luminous”: Christopher Caudwell and the Communist Hero; Anindya Raychaudhuri.- 7. Unspeakable Heroism: The Second World War and the End of the Hero; Lucy Hall and Gill Plain.- 8. Constructing and Deconstructing the Fantasy Hero: Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law”Trilogy; Jochen Petzold.- 9. An Unlikely Hero for the War-on-Terror Decade: Patrick Neate’s
City of Tiny Lights; Nicole Falkenhayner.- 10. The Heroic in British Young Adult Fiction: Traditions and Renegotiations; Kristina Sperlich.- 11. Victims and Heroes Get all Mixed Up: Gender and Agency in the Thriller; Barbara Korte.- Bibliography.- Index.-

About the author

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.