This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century. 

Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature and British Culture at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is deputy speaker of the university’s collaborative research centre on ‘Heroes, Heroisation and Heroisms’ and is working on Victorian magazines in this context. Other areas of interest are travel writing and representations of history in popular media.

Stefanie Lethbridge is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is member of the university’s collaborative research centre on ‘Heroes, Heroisation and Heroisms’. She has published on British poetry anthologies since the Renaissance, on eighteenth-century and Victorian print culture, on sensation fiction and on representations of the heroic in popular culture.