Date of Award
2014
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
"The 'hero' has figured as an important archetypal construction throughout literary history that has evolved over centuries. Instead of tracing the evolution of the hero chronologically, this essay will present a postmodern reading of the hero in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Homer’s Iliad by rereading those texts through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through this retrospective reading, heroic construction comes to mean something different than it does to classicists or Romanticists. In his construction of Leopold Bloom as the everyman, modern hero, Joyce is unconcerned with physical strength, youth, honor, virtue, lineage, or glory. Rather, Joyce constructs Bloom as a hero with psychological and emotional depth, intellectual strength, and an identity in the domestic sphere; Bloom is constructed as Other from dominant culture and as a self-defined individual. This list of qualities, which implies that the hero is a man who functions in multiple, simultaneous roles, provides the definition of 'hero' that will be utilized throughout this paper."
Recommended Citation
Bayse, Catey, "Canonical Heroes Redefined for Postmodern Readership" (2014). Senior Theses. 1.
https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/clas_theses/1
Rights
The author owns the copyright to this work.
