| Description |
xvi, 304 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
1. The Emersonian hero: Under the shadow of our swords: Emerson and the heroic ideal -- Nathaniel Hawthorne: the absurdity of heroism -- Herman Melville: the nature of authority -- Walt Whitman: the putative hero -- Henry James: the illusion of freedom -- 2. The Southern hero: The code of Southern heroism -- William Gilmore Simms and the antebellum writers -- Thomas Nelson Page and the postbellum writers -- Twentieth-century criticism and literature -- 3. The Black hero: The idealism of Negro literature -- The two traditions: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois -- The Negro awakening: Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, and others -- The major authors: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin -- Contemporary Negro literature -- 4. The disenchanted hero: Introductory: the twentieth century -- Ernest Hemingway: the renunciation of America -- F. Scott Fitzgerald: the hero in retrospect -- 5. The Quixotic hero: Saul Bellow: the victim and the hero -- J.D. Salinger: suicide and survival in the modern world -- Norman Mailer: the quest for heroism. |
| Subject |
American literature -- History and criticism.
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Heroes in literature.
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