Hero

Abstract

Worldwide, all heroes depend on their central place in a particular culture or society and on sympathetic treatment in myth and story for their appeal in a particularized time or even long before it. Those story-generating figures that appear early in culture history are deemed to be responsible for the life designs at a society's core, while most scholars, in analyzing such figures, have seen them as meaningfully expressing those designs. This hitherto perennial concept, on traditionally involving notions leadership and praiseworthy example, has experienced a profound decline - or at least a number of significant changes - since ancient times, as it moves from cultural force to folk hero to popular idol.