Abstract
The monograph Hero - Antihero - Superhero - No -hero in the Cultural Space of the Past and the Present is a follow -up, in terms of outline, to two existing electronic books: Identity: Construction, Subversion, Absence (Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2014) and Utopia/Dystopia: Forms - Changes - Borders (Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2015). These publications emerged from working meetings of members of the research development programme at Charles University (PRVOUK), no. 9 Literature and Arts in Intercultural Communication.
Authors who contributed to this book focus, in a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, on problems of literature and other kinds of cultural production from the earliest periods up to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty -first century (music, theatre, film, comics). The main topic is the tendency to complicate narratives and fictional worlds by configurations of diverse characters which no longer need clear ethical or narrative determination.
At the same time, however, this tendency produces a contradictory trend: the need to emphasize a specific ethical status or action of a certain character. The present book discusses distinctive and productive types expressed by the four categories mentioned in the title (e.g., romantic hero; superfluous man; man without qualities; superhero; etc.), both in relation to the cultural context of the given period, and in terms of the linear development of the specific hero type.