Antihero

History

An early antihero is Homer's Thersites, since he serves to voice criticism, showcasing an anti-establishment stance. The concept has also been identified in classical Greek drama, Roman satire, and Renaissance literature such as Don Quixote and the picaresque rogue.

An anti-hero that fits the more contemporary notion of the term is the lower-caste warrior Karna in the Mahabharata. Karna is the sixth brother of the Pandavas (symbolising good), born out of wedlock, and raised by a lower-caste charioteer. He is ridiculed by the Pandavas, but accepted as an excellent warrior by the antagonist Duryodhana, thus becoming a loyal friend to him, eventually fighting on the wrong side of the final just war. Karna serves as a critique of the then-society, the protagonists, as well as the idea of the war being worthwhile itself – even if Krishna later justifies it properly.

The term antihero was first used as early as 1714, emerging in works such as Rameau's Nephew in the 18th century, and is also used more broadly to cover Byronic heroes as well, created by the English poet Lord Byron.

Literary Romanticism in the 19th century helped popularize new forms of the antihero, such as the Gothic double. The antihero eventually became an established form of social criticism, a phenomenon often associated with the unnamed protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. The antihero emerged as a foil to the traditional hero archetype, a process that Northrop Frye called the fictional "center of gravity". This movement indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, as was the shift from epic to ironic narratives.

Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been called "the first antihero in the American nursery". Charlotte Mullen of Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte (1894) has been described as an anti-heroine.

The antihero became prominent in early 20th-century existentialist works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915), Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938), and Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942). The protagonist in these works is an indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by boredom, angst, and alienation.

The antihero entered American literature in the 1950s and up to the mid-1960s as an alienated figure, unable to communicate. The American antihero of the 1950s and 1960s was typically more proactive than his French counterpart. The British version of the antihero emerged in the works of the "angry young men" of the 1950s. The collective protests of Sixties counterculture saw the solitary antihero gradually eclipsed from fictional prominence, though not without subsequent revivals in literary and cinematic form. During the Golden Age of Television from the 2000s and into early 2020s, antiheroes such as Tony Soprano, Gru, Megamind, Jack Bauer, Gregory House, Dexter Morgan, Walter White, Frank Underwood, Don Draper, Neal Caffrey, Nucky Thompson, Jax Teller, Alicia Florrick, Annalise Keating, Selina Meyer, Hector Barbossa and Kendall Roy became prominent in the most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows.

In his essay published in 2020, Postheroic Heroes – A Contemporary Image (German: Postheroische Helden – Ein Zeitbild), German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling examines the simultaneity of heroic and post-heroic role models as an opportunity to explore the place of the heroic in contemporary society. In contemporary art, artists such as the French multimedia artist Thomas Liu Le Lann negotiate in his series of Soft Heroes, in which overburdened, modern and tired Anti Heroes seem to have given up on the world around them.

References

References

1. "Anti-Hero". [[Oxford University Press]].
2. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - fourth edition
3. Kennedy, Theresa Varney. (2014). "'No Exit' in Racine's Phèdre: The Making of the Anti-Hero". [[The French Review]].
4. Klapp, Orrin E.. (September 1948). "The Creation of Popular Heroes". [[American Journal of Sociology]].
5. Petersen, Michael Bang. (2019). "An Age of Chaos?". RSA Journal.
6. Klapp, Orrin E.. (1948). "The Creation of Popular Heroes". American Journal of Sociology.
7. (2013). "Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism". Open Road.
8. (14 February 2013). "antihero".
9. "Literary Terms and Definitions A". [[Carson-Newman University]].
10. (2007). "American Culture in the 1950s". [[Edinburgh University Press]].
11. (2015-03-01). "Karna The Unsung Hero of the Mahabharata". One Point Six Technology Pvt Ltd.
12. (31 August 2012). "Antihero".
13. "Literary Terms and Definitions B". [[Carson-Newman University]].
14. (2014). "The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays". [[Taylor & Francis]].
15. (2008). "The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut". [[Palgrave Macmillan]].
16. (2006). "The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-century Seduction Narrative". [[Ohio State University Press]].
17. (2002). "Anatomy of Criticism". [[Penguin Books.
18. (2001). "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)". [[W. W. Norton & Company]].
19. (2008). "Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture". [[Ashgate Publishing]].
20. (27 February 2011). "The 10 best Neglected literary classics – in pictures". [[The Guardian]].
21. (1 April 1983). "Twentieth Century Fiction". [[Macmillan Publishers.
22. (2005). "Dostoevsky's Polyphonic Talent". [[University Press of America]].
23. (2012). "Psychological Constructs and the Craft of African Fiction of Yesteryears: Six Studies". Langaa Research & Publishing CIG.
24. (2004). "Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe". Rodopi.
25. (1968). "A Short History of French Literature". [[Penguin Books]].
26. (2000). "The Jameson Reader". [[Wiley-Blackwell.
27. (1996). "Everybody is Sitting on the Curb: How and why America's Heroes Disappeared". Praeger.
28. (1996). "The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in English". [[Cambridge University Press]].
29. (11 July 2013). "Why Is the Golden Age of TV So Dark?".
30. Faithfull, E. (2021). How House brought the "savant anti-hero" into the mainstream and changed TV dramas. www.nine.com.au. https://www.nine.com.au/entertainment/latest/house-savant-anti-hero-medical-drama-9now/0e030210-8bfe-424f-b687-f2e36e6f0694
31. Pruner, A. (n.d.). Hear us out: Gregory House was TV's last great doctor. https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/hear-us-out-gregory-house-was-tvs-last-great-doctor/
32. deutschlandfunk.de. (2020-03-05). "Ulrich Bröckling: "Postheroische Helden" - Man hüte sich vor Helden!".
33. "Soft Heroes".
34. (2021-05-10). "Thomas Liu Le Lann: Wer ist Milo?".