In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226075433)

In an age of upheaval and challenged faith, traditional heroes are hard to come by, and harder still to love, with their bloodstained hands and backs unbowed by the consequences of their actions. Through penetrating readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero--the antihero--has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model.

Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of B?hner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hasek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

Author: Victor Brombert
ISBN-10: 0226075435
ISBN-13: 9780226075433
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2001
Pages: 178
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.07w x 0.58d