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Published April 1, 2022 | Version v1
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How to Become a Hero

Creators

  • 1. Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Contributors

  • 1. Faculty of "Artes Liberales", University of Warsaw, Poland

Description

Becoming a hero is the master plot of modern popular (especially Hollywood) narrative, manifesting in such diverse contemporary forms as coming-of-age tales, superhero origin stories, monomyth quests of refusing the call and returning with the elixir, and “emotional journeys” of self-discovery and stepping up. Yet despite the widespread claims of mythological prototypes for this master plot, classical myth itself is only sporadically interested in its heroes’ childhood and adolescence – and the handful of exceptions, from the Telemachy to the Achilleid, offer an instructive gallery of the narrative and ideological differences between ancient and modern notions of the narrativity of childhood and the agency of youth. Modern fiction for pre-adult readers and viewers has colonised this vacant space in a variety of ways, populating the adolescence of heroes with adventures which overlay classical myths and models with distinctively modern ideas of young-adult narrativity and the nature of heroic growth. Three notable extended cases include the Young Heroes series by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris (2002–2004), the live-action Young Hercules television series (1999), and Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series (1999), all of which offer sustained measurements of the distance between ancient and modern popular conceptions of adolescence, and of how modern mythical constructions of a classical hero’s journey differ from their ancient prototypes.

Notes

Book chapter in the volume: Katarzyna Marciniak, ed., Our Mythical Hope: The Ancient Myths as Medicine for Hardships of Life in Children's and Young Adults' Culture, in the series "Our Mythical Childhood", Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2021, 836 pp. Open Access https://www.wuw.pl/product-eng-16830-Our-Mythical-Hope-The-Ancient-Myths-as-Medicine-for-the-Hardships-of-Life-in-Childrens-and-Young-Adults-Culture-PDF.html This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No 681202 (2016–2022), Our Mythical Childhood... The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children's and Young Adults' Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges, ERC Consolidator Grant led by Katarzyna Marciniak. Project's Website: www.omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl. The publication is licensed under (CC BY 3.0 PL) (full license available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/legalcode).

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Additional details

Funding

OurMythicalChildhood – Our Mythical Childhood... The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges 681202
European Commission