FROM BEOWULF TO SANTIAGO: CONTINUITY AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN HEROIC LITERARY TRADITION

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This article traces the historical development of the heroic ideal across English and American literary traditions from the Anglo-Saxon epic through the twentieth century. Drawing on a comparative framework informed by Campbell's monomyth, Frye's modal typology, and Aristotle's theory of tragic heroism, the article argues that beneath the considerable surface variation produced by different historical and cultural contexts, a set of structurally constant heroic qualities — courage, integrity, sacrifice, and meaningful encounter with transformative opposition — persists across the entire span of the traditions examined. At the same time, a fundamental and consistent divergence is identified between the communal orientation of English literary heroism and the individualistic, privatised orientation of its American counterpart. The article demonstrates this argument through analysis of representative texts: Beowulf, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Eliot's Middlemarch, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The article contributes a diachronic comparative perspective on heroic representation that illuminates both the resilience of the heroic narrative as a literary form and the cultural work that different configurations of heroism perform in different historical moments.