Heroic Identity Research Articles

Mastering survivorship: How brands facilitate the transformation to heroic survivor

This study investigates the identity transformation from mere survivor to heroic survivor of cancer. Utilizing a multi-method approach, interviews with seventeen female cancer survivors and five blog analyses, this research sheds light on the processes involved in the transformation from mere survivor to heroic survivor and the integral role of brands in this transformation process. Brands are used to signal heroism to the self (inward expression) and to others (outward expression) as well as to combat countervailing forces that deter the survivor's progress toward mastery of a heroic identity. The findings provide a rich understanding of the heroic archetype and its centrality to the mastery of survivorship. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for brand managers, giving attention to the importance of consumer–brand relationships.

Constructing Nationalist Masculine Identities: Heroism and Legitimacy in Joshua Nkomo's The Story of my Life

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to use the issues of legitimacy and heroic identities as a focus to demonstrate the inextricability of the form and content of a text. First, the article briefly outlines Joshua Nkomo's biography, then it examines the self-narration in his memoir, The story of my life (2001). To a lesser extent and for comparative purposes, Edgar Tekere's, A lifetime of struggle (2007) is discussed. Both writers were instrumental in building an independent Africa. In this article, the interplay between the imagination of the public and the imagination of the narrators, resulting in complicity with or rejection of the masculine identity created in the narration, is interrogated. Secondly, the workings and role of memory in life narratives are analysed. Characterisation in autobiography is also examined by interrogating motives in political action and self-report, setting, relationships, embodiment, genealogy and heredity, socio- economic background and historical forces, educational background, individual will and self-assertion.

Fighting heroic hegemony with ennui: The remarkable everyday in World of Warcraft

Abstract This article explores the predominance of mundane everyday tasks within the World of Warcraft (WoW) gamespace to emphasize the importance of the quotidian within this purported heroic environment. The importance of what is understood to be ordinary-everyday-tasks in accomplishing heroic quests, I argue, challenges popular and scholarly perceptions of WoW, as a gendered gaming space based in heroic time and presumably inhabited by skilled male technocrats. I illustrate that the WoW game-environment, in offering players the option of in-game progression not only through slaying dragons but also by picking herbs and sewing clothes makes a definite rupture in the idea of heroic temporality, which is traditionally understood as masculine while the everyday is essentialized as feminine. Without gendering any task as either feminine or masculine I assert that heroic identity in WoW is extensively influenced by everyday ennui, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often means a regular engagement with the quotidian. By allowing for the possibility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multiple temporalities open out possibilities for perceiving the WoW landscape as ideal for resisting hegemonies of masculinized heroism and the creation and sustenance of alternative modes of agency.

Of Heroes, Ghosts, and Witnesses: The Construction of Masculine Identity in the War Poets' Narratives

Drawing on some of the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets, this article focuses on the ghost not only as the clearest expression of the myth of the Great War but also as a counter-model undermining traditionally heroic patterns and unmasking certain narratives and identities that had been marginalized, excluded, or repressed. By assessing the ghost as a shadow of the hero, the ghost as a vehicle between life and death and the ghost as haunting memory, it will be possible to contextualize and explore the meanings and experiences of the hero in relation to the antihero, cross over the boundaries between the two and enable a more complex analysis of the real Great War soldier. The article will also study how the memory of war and of war heroisms is rethought and worked over by the veteran as witness and what writing as remembering might entail in terms of the expression of the self in relation to the dominant war myths. Bearing in mind that memory speaks through the texts, sometimes against the writer's will, particular attention will be given to how the reworking of the past shaped heroic masculine identity and to what extent the veteran's identity was determined by what of the war experience he incorporated into the text.

Les armes d’Achille : prolongement de la mémoire héroïque ?

Achilles’s weapons : a prolongation of the memory of the hero ? Achilles’ fame, archetypal hero of the Greek mythology, is closely linked to its fabulous weapons. Don of the gods, they are the keystone of the heroic identity value for the members of the Greek and Roman elite. The written sources and the figurative directory which put forward these fabulous objects, convey the transmission of the memory of a legendary past on which the Greek and Roman societies lean. The two figurative episodes of the legend which represent weapons on the paintings of Pompeii’s houses are Thetis in forges of Hephaestus and the Discovery to Scyros. This article insists on the reception and symbolism of the Achilles’s weapons, then on the role of the symbolism of the shield in the universe of Roman creation of the first century A. D.

Empire to nationhood: heroism in natural disaster stories for children

PurposeNatural disaster stories narrate unsettling natural events and proffer scripts for social action in the face of unforeseen and overwhelming circumstances. The purpose of this study is to investigate stories of natural disasters recounted for New Zealand school children in the School Journal during its first 100 years of publication.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis is used to categorise the disaster event and to identify two distinct periods of disaster stories – imperial and national. Textual analysis of indicative stories from each period centres on the construction of social scripts for child readers.FindingsIn the imperial period tales of individual heroism and self‐sacrifice predominate, while the national period is characterised by stories of ordinary families, community solidarity and survival. Through this investigation of natural disaster stories for children, the paper identifies the shifting models of heroic identity offered to New Zealand children through educational texts.Originality/valueThis study adds to the existing literature on the School Journal and to the broader study of the history of imperialist and nationalist education in New Zealand. In these times of increased disaster awareness it also draws attention to the significance of disaster narratives in offering social scripts for children to draw on in the event of an actual disaster experience.

Children's Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities (review)

Reviewed by: Children's Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Paula T. Connolly (bio) Children's Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities. By Jo Lampert. New York: Routledge, 2010. In her examination of a selection of picture books and young adult literature, Jo Lampert explores the cultural impact of the September 11th attacks as represented in children's literature about 9/11, particularly the ways in which personal and communal identities have been refigured as a response to the attacks. Focusing on the intersecting constructions of ethnic, heroic, and national identities, she examines how vying representations—of multiculturalism and isolationism, grief and recovery, vulnerability and agency-share an often uneasy narrative space as authors attempt to create new post-9/11 identities. Lampert's first two chapters set the context for her study. In "Children's Literature and Its Cultural Influence," she draws upon literary and cultural theorists to make the case that the September 11th attacks precipitated a recreation of personal and national identity, particularly for Americans. Facets of this identity shift, she argues, are evinced in children's literature as characters model new identities and ideologies of ethnicity, nationality, and heroism. These texts also anticipate—if not prescribe—the emotional state of readers, often implying their vulnerability and ready need for stories to "heal" the wounded reader (18). In "Identity Shifts after 9/11," Lampert provides a primer on the theoretical perspectives, principally postmodernism and postcolonialism, that inform her study of shifting narrative representations of identity. Her site of interest, she notes, is the space between narratively depicted binaries—between, for example, "American" and "Arab," "inclusion" and "isolation." In the following three chapters—"Ethnic Identities," "National Identities," and "Heroic Identities"—Lampert does the core work of her study, providing close readings to demonstrate how the three categories inextricably intersect. In "Ethnic Identities," she discusses the picture books On That Day (Patel 2001) and There's a Big Beautiful World Out There (Carlson 2002), arguing that through such techniques as the use of personal pronouns (particularly "us" and "we") and the visual representations of white protagonists who must be reassured about the state of the world, the texts construct a "unified [and exclusive] American subject" (55). She further explores contesting [End Page 480] ideologies in the Parvana series for young adults. Told from the point of view of an Arab protagonist, the novels nonetheless ultimately argue for the universal acceptance of Western values. Lampert points out, for example, that representing Arab women as victims, weak, or desirous of becoming "Westernized" makes them "palatable" (65) to intended (largely American) readers. Such representations, she notes, imagine Western countries (particularly America) as necessary saviors and models of civilization. As Lampert points out, such ethnic scripting does little to further any real sense of multiculturalism or appreciation of diversity. In "National Identities," Lampert discusses the picture books It's Still a Dog's New York (Roth 2001) and the Caldecott-awarded The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (Gerstein 2003), as well as the young adult novels Lucy and the Liberty Quilt (London 2001) and Girl X Recreated (Rowe 2002). Here she interrogates how, in It's Still a Dog's New York, Roth's creation of a romanticized national identity evinces a sense of a "national 'forgetting'" that erases "the homelessness, racial tension [and . . .] crime that are also familiar New York narratives" (98). Girl X Recreated, which was in the process of being written when the 9/11 attacks occurred, takes the "form of a fictionalized electronic diary" between Girl X of then-present day 2001 and a boy living in the year 3002 (124). In her choice of this text, Lampert explores 9/11 as a moment of "interruption"; set in Australia, Girl X Recreated both suggests the worldwide impact of the 9/11 attacks and the temporality of their effect as the characters return to typical matters of personal teenage angst a few months after the attacks. The final chapter examines the recreation of heroism following 9/11. From the picture books Bravemole (Jonell 2002) and Fireboat (Kalman 2002) to DC Comics' two-volume anthology, September 11th 2001 (2002), Lampert argues that the construction...

Heroic Identity in the Dilessi Affair, Aris Velouhiotis, and Alexander: A Reading of Angelopoulos's Megalexandros

Theodoros Angelopoulos's Megalexandros might have achieved only mixed critical and popular success, but as an eye into Greek history the film provides a psychological autopsy of the Greek hero in his many contradictory guises and enables us to move through its several conflations and transformations to view Greek history in a newly striking light. This paper will examine the film's construction of heroic identity, an identity that has its roots in listes (the Dilessi affair), andartes (Aris Velouhiotis), popular culture (Karagiozis), and history (the historical Alexander the Great), providing a run-up of Greek history from the Hellenistic through the Byzantine period up to the 1940s. The ambiguous and often perplexing nature of Megalexandros is clarified in this paper as an historical pastiche that capitalizes on invented rituals, storying as a constructive technique, and resemblances that connect memory to yield a paranoid narrative. It is a narrative that speaks to a split heroic identity that both complicates history and is fractured by it. The hero is understood here as a complex double that confounds the monster-slayer with the monster and the hero with pariah in a narrative that emerges out of liberationist mythic Byzantine folk culture only to collapse into a failed text of Greek against Greek that can only end, as it does, in an anthropophagic feasting on the hero that cannibalizes the social fabric even as it enables a starved body politic to survive its savior.

Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer

Scholarship on The Wanderer has struggled to reconcile the Christian resolution of the poem with the speaker’s lingering dependence on Germanic-heroic cultural structures. The problem with the argument that heroic identity somehow persists for the speaker is, I suggest, that identity is always correlative to a cultural world. A “worldless” subject is a post-medieval, Cartesian innovation. The final lines of The Wanderer signal, in fact, that the speaker yearns for a new foundation for the self. With the loss of heroic culture, therefore, heroic identity loses its essential correlate. The crisis posed by the text is that the speaker experiences exile not only from a homeland, but also from the cultural framework that allowed his identity to cohere meaningfully. Nevertheless, the argument can be made that the poet seeks to preserve heroic values, and thereby salvage heroic identity. These values are deployed, however, with a new purpose: to confront resolutely the loss of the old cultural milieu. Heroic identity, therefore, finds an alternative correlate: not the immediate plenitude of a quasi-mythical heroic past, but a contemporary cultural modality mediated by its loss. The violence of an ideological and cultural transition is thus mitigated. I conclude by demonstrating how this reading situates The Wanderer precisely within the space of Anglo-Saxon literary production.

Scott Gwara, Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf

Scott Gwara, Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf

Seeing double: the transforming personalities of Alan Moore's Promethea and the Ulster Cycle's Cuchulain

This article explores the physical and psychic transformation of Sophie-Promethea®, of Alan Moore's Promethea, and Cuchulain, of the Irish Ulster Cycle, into dual heroic identities, illustrating the psychological concerns present in the texts. This heroic process of establishing a dual identity dramatizes the creation of a balance between the conscious ego and the unconscious psyche, a pattern of individuation put forward by theorist Carl Jung and subsequently explored by Erich Neumann and James Hillman. The plot structure of the texts, as well as elements of visual/descriptive detail concerning transformation support this comparative examination and confirm a concern for an attempted resolution between conflicting psychological aspects of the heroic individual. This study highlights both the heroic failure of Cuchulain to attain this desired resolution and Moore's creation of a new paradigm for potential synthesis between the worlds of the ego and the psyche as illustrated through his character, Promethea®.

Children's Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities. Jo Lampert. New York: Routledge, 2010. 204 pages USD 93.18 (hardcover).

<i>Children's Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities</i>. Jo Lampert. New York: Routledge, 2010. 204 pages USD 93.18 (hardcover).

Children's fiction about 9/11: ethnic, heroic and national identities

Permissions List of Figures Chapter 1: Children's Literature and its Cultural Influence Chapter 2: Identity Shifts After 9/11 Chapter 3: Ethnic Identities Chapter 4: National Identities Chapter 5: Heroic Identities Chapter 6: Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

A rehearsed self in repeated narratives? The case of two interviews with a former hooligan

This article investigates the identity constructions of a former hooligan in two repeated narratives, obtained through interviews with a time lapse of six years. In both narratives, the interviewee constructs a similar heroic identity and opposes it to other categories such as cowards and followers. However, when relating how he became a hooligan, the interviewee presents himself as a follower. This contradiction with the heroic identity shows his struggle with group membership and that ‘identity work’ is an ongoing process. On the other hand, the striking similarity between the identity constructions in both interviews supports the thesis of a rehearsed self in big stories, but I argue that this is also due to other reasons, namely the role of the same interviewer who co-constructs the interview but who is also an outsider, and the influence of previous ‘rehearsals’ of the story, both within the group of hooligans and in real life.

“Wigge under Wætere”: Beowulf's Revision of the Fight with Grendel's Mother

This article examines Beowulf's speeches regarding his fight with Grendel's mother. In the speeches to both Hrothgar and Hygelac, Beowulf revises unwitnessed events in Grendel's mother's mere in order to cover up details of the fight that threaten to undermine his masculine and heroic identity. Both the sexual nature of the fight and her role as a phallic mother cause Beowulf to conceal not only what happens in this battle but also the transgressive body of Grendel's mother. Just as he distracts attention from the woman at the center of the text, so too does he affirm her danger and significance, revealing his own fractured masculinity.

Families and Institutions for Shell-Shocked Soldiers in Australia after the First World War

Since the 1980s, numerous historical studies have provided a complex picture of the relationship between families and psychiatric institutions. Historians of shell-shock have been slow to respond to this literature. Instead, their primary interest has been in the medical treatment of the condition, as well as state and cultural responses. This article offers a fresh perspective on the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers by examining families' involvement in their institutionalisation in Australia after the First World War. It explores how kin mobilised the repatriation discourse of 'preference' to secure treatment for veterans in segregated mental hospitals which separated military cases from 'confirmed civilian lunatics'. This article argues that by asserting that ex-servicemen were a more deserving class of patient, veterans' kin strategically deployed the stigma of mental illness to ensure better quality care for ex-servicemen, preserve their heroic identity as soldiers, and deflect some of the eugenic shame of 'madness'.

A geração dos anos de 1960: o peso de uma herança

O artigo propõe analisar o peso desmedido da herança da geração dos anos de 1960 sobre a geração de jovens de hoje. Procura destacar a historicidade dos movimentos dessa década, seja do ponto de vista de sua linhagem e filiação, seja de sua não-homogeneidade, com o objetivo de compreender o processo que construiu, ao longo do tempo, o mito dos anos de 1960 e a figuração identitária de sua geração, diluindo a complexidade, a heterogeneidade, os conflitos, as heranças e a contextualização histórica dos movimentos. A identificação das gerações posteriores com o mito da geração dos anos de 1960, que tem se manifestado episodicamente, indica um aprisionamento das gerações mais jovens pela imagem de uma identidade heróica da geração anterior, indicativo da ausência de um movimento de separação entre as gerações, e portanto da produção de uma diferença geracional, e das dificuldades de recebimento da herança, isto é, da possibilidade do encontro de uma filiação.

Writing the Future: Lazamon's Prophetic History by Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley Merlin: A Casebook by Peter H. Goodrich , Raymond H. Thompson (review)

1082 Reviews with a conflation of betrayals at the level of the narrative, that of 'individual personal intimacy' and the 'collective failure to preserve the documentation of a manuscript culture' (p. xv). Several areas of investigation are announced, among which are his? tory,nationhood, masculine heroic identity,gender, and social order and interaction. Batt's analysis covers the traditional background of French and English chronicle and romance narratives and their adaptation fora late medieval English audience, fol? lowing the changes taking place during this process, including texts such as Arthour and Merlin, Kyng Alysaunder, and Malory's sources, La Mort le roi Artu and the stanzaic Le Morte Arthur. By comparison with a similar compilation of Arthurian material, that of Micheau Gonot, who in 1470 also produced an Arthuriad, forJacques d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, Malory's enterprise leaves more room forthe reader's intervention in the text. His 'emotional' engagement with the narrative is present from Tale 1, where the historical dimension ofthe Arthurian story is apparent, mediated through Merlin, whose non-standard presentation (his name is sometimes abbreviated in the Winchester manuscript, sometimes not) 'reflects an uncertainty about his status in a text that signals but does not investigate [his] distict nature', since his ad? vice is not always taken (p. 53). A large part ofthe analysis focuses on violence against the body, either prompted by desire (Uther's desire for Igrayne gives the tone for all subsequent acts of rape) or by transgression and punishment, as in the case of Balin. In an investigation of the following three tales, Batt narrows the focus on the topos of heroism, examined in the episode of Arthur's war with Lucius and in the narra? tives of Lancelot and Gareth. The story of Tristram is given the function of 'setting limits', both in terms of the elite it addresses and in the descriptions of madness as a way of alienation followed by a recovery of identity. In Malory's version of the Holy Grail quest Batt reads the involvement of the community, while drawing attention to the 'more immediate and inclusive [. . .] political, religious and historical relevance' of his narrative to a fifteenth-centuryaudience, as compared with his French source (p- 137)- In the last chapter Batt turns to the issues of displacement and commemora? tion, emphasizing two ends of the love process, fromthe May passage to the end of the love affairbetween Lancelot and Guenevere. At this stage what seems to be important is Malory's 'engagement with memory, rather than with relic', which brings to the Morte an 'awareness ofthe fifteenth-centuryfashionings of death' (p. 181). Batt's study is persuasive in its effortless,intellectually stimulating interpretation of symbols and themes; commentaries on sources, manuscripts, and material culture are combined with modern views ofthe human body, violence, and narrative techniques. This challenging work addresses a specialized audience, and its discourse extends beyond traditional approaches of Malory's text. A new interpretation of the Morte emerges, one that inscribes the modern response into the fifteenth-centurytext. This short review does little justice to either Kato's or Batt's studies; both remain, how? ever, as two analyses of the Morte which will change our view of Malory's work for some time. University of Wales, Bangor Raluca L. Radulescu WritingtheFuture: La^amon's Prophetic History. By Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2002. x+182 pp. ?37.50. ISBN 0-70831714 -6. Merlin: A Casebook. Ed. by Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson. (Arthurian Characters and Themes) New York and London: Routledge. 2003. viii + 443pp. ?75. ISBN 0-8153-0658-x. These two Arthurian studies show more contrasts than parallels. Writing theFuture, based on a Cornell dissertation, is its author's firstbook; Merlin: A Casebook as- MLR, 100.4, 2005 1083 sembles seventeen critical essays (plus introduction) by twentieth-century European and North American scholars. Each book offerssomething, but the second more than the first. Wickham-Crowley's study, with some reason, bypasses historical philology, the main concern of earlier work on La3amon. It fails into three parts, dealing in turn with language as history; the potential of writing and community; and history, prophecy, and possibility...

Malory's Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt (review)

Reviews Catherine batt, Malory's Mone Darthur: RemakingArthurian Tradition. The New Middle Ages. NewYork: Palgravc, 2002. Pp. xxiii, 264. isbn: 0-312-22998-4. $49.95. This is an exciting book. In her preface, Catherine Batt writes, Malory's fiction ofthe Morte as a series ofreadings often conflates the roles ofreader, writer, and text, and this highlights the possibility ofchoice and responsibility at the formallevelofnarrative direction.Thedeclarationsofintentscatteredthroughout theMorte[suchas] "NówleveweofthismaterandspekeweofsirPalomydes". . .intimate that the narratorial voice, the imagined readership, and "the book" are all engaged in establishing narrative event, (xvii) She adds, 'Malorycontinuallybrings the nature and function ofArthurian literature into question, prompting reconsiderations of how the material relates to issues of historical awareness, nationhood, the construction of masculine heroic identity, and constructions ofgender and social order and interaction' (xviii). Batt's approach offers a remarkably fruitful way of looking at the Morte. The preface introduces this approach through awonderful discussion ofthe longer 'May passage,' where Batt argues that 'the terms describing our destructive forgetfulness, "deface" and "layaparte," involve the erasure and disregardingofmanuscriptwitness' (xv) as well as of love. After the preface and a rich introductory chapter placing Malory in relation to his sources and to French and English Arthurian traditions, further chapters progress through the Morte, covering a wide range ofepisodes and characters. Batt demonstrates how 'in working through the legend's various narrative paradigms and the complexities of"our" engagementwith them, [Malory] implicidy expresses anxiety about the gap between an ideologically straightforward Arthurian world and the difficulties of realizing it textually' (xviii). One gap involves the Pentecostal Oath, whose injunction against the rape ofwomen ignores the possibility 'that men, too, maybe exposed to sexual threat' (69). Elsewhere in the Morte, though, '[t]he Oath's gendered reading of the male as "whole" and the female as violable will...come under revision, particularly with regard to Launcelot' (69). Batt's thesis has many facets, and her argument is basically compelling. But she makes occasional dubious claims. Like many Malorians nowadays, she writes from a feminist perspective, which illuminates some issues while clouding others. Her discussion ofthe Pentecostal Oath includes the claim, 'The Oath's prescription and proscription regarding women...asserts control over the female body by the king and his fellowship' (68). But just as the Oath's final proscription against battle in a wrongful quarrel for world's goods, is hardly away ofasserting RoundTable control over the goods it prohibits knights from wrongfully seeking, a proscription against rape is hardly a way of asserting control over rape's potential victims. In both ARTHURIANA I4.I (20O4) 9* REVIEWS 93 proscriptions, what the Oath requires RoundTable knights to control is themselves. Batt says, 'That the threat to, and defenses of, women's integrity potentially come from the same quarter...puts in question the status ofthe knight as law-enforcer, who agrees in this oath to be self-policing' (69). It is significant, however, that in case such self-policing fails, the Oath specifies punishment, forbidding rape upon pain ofdeath. And does the prescription always to do ladies succor assert knights' control over ladies or ladies' control over knights? That depends on who defines the occasion and means of succor—knights or ladies. Often, in the Morte, it is the latter. Fortunately, Batt is much too sophisticated to follow a party line. Thus, she recognizes that *[t]he law both acknowledges masculine aggression and seeks to contain and redirect it' (69). The book's main weakness is Batt'swriting style. Like many present-day Malorians, she wields lit-crit jargon as readily as Launcelot wields a sword, but with less grace and flair. Although her prose is sometimes unproblematic, she often expresses her invaluable insights in such sentences as 'Csordas offers embodiment as a phenomenological paradigm, but it usefully alerts us to the textual complexity of the chivalric self as dynamic cultural agent in the Morte, and especially to the problematizing capacity ofits narrative representation' (xix). Readers should not let such unappetizing prose diminish their appreciation of Batt's brilliant ideas. Far better to emulate Bors and 'take the woo...as we have takyn the weale' (The Works ofSir Thomas Mahry, 3d edn, 3:1169). FELICIA ACKERMAN Brown University Catherine batt...

:Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature

For most readers and spectators, heroism takes the form of public, idealized masculinity. It calls to mind socially and morally elevated men embarking on active adventures: courageously confronting danger; valiantly rescuing the helpless; exploring and claiming unconquered terrain. But in this book, Mary Beth Rose argues that from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, a passive, more female, but equally potent dimension of heroic identity began to dominate English culture. For both men and women, heroism came to be defined in terms of patience, as the ability to endure suffering, catastrophe, and pain. Interweaving discourses of gender, Rose explores ways in which this heroics of endurance became the dominant model. She examines the glamorous, failed destinies of heroes in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe; Elizabeth I's creation of a heroic identity in her public speeches; the autobiographies of four ordinary women thrust into the public sphere by civil war; and the seduction of heroes into slavery in works by Milton, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Ultimately, her study demonstrates the importance of the female in the creation of modern heroism, while offering a critique of both idealized action and suffering.