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The Hero and HeroMaking Across Genres

This book critically examines how a Hero is made, sustained, and even deformed, in contemporary cultures. It brings together diverse ideas from philosophy, mythology, religion, literature, cinema, and social media to explore how heroes are constructed across genres, mediums, and traditions.The essays in this volume present fresh perspectives for readers to conceptualize the myriad possibilities the term ‘Hero’ brings with itself. They examine the making and unmaking of the heroes across literary, visual and social cultures —in religious spaces and in classical texts; in folk tales and fairy tales; in literature, as seen in Heinrich Böll’sUnd Sagte Kein Einziges Wort, Thomas Brüssig’sHeroes like Us, and in movies, like Christopher Nolan’sInterstellar, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the