Marvel Heroes
Is Spiderman or any Marvel heroes considered contemporary literature?
I have to write an essay talking about the concept of heroes in the past 2.5 millennia vs. our view of heroes today. So I need some contemporary literature to support that our view of heroes did not change compared to back then... However I am having a hard time to find contemporary literature ><"
So my question is if Marvel heroes like Spiderman, X-man, Hulk, etc. considered literature?
If not... can you give me some ideas of contemporary literatures that has to do with heroes? Note that by "hero" i didn't mean some super human! Just normal main character from a book is okay! I have Harry Potter as one of my point so I need some other idea!
Comic book heroes are considered to be contemporary, but it is debatable whether they are considered to be “literature”.
It partly depends on what you mean by “literature”. If you mean any story that is at least published somewhere, then of course they are part of “literature”. But some critics use the term “paraliterature” to cover genre fiction and reserve “literature” for what they consider to be higher works. See http://www.answers.com/topic/paraliterature .
Varney the Vampire ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varney_the_Vampire ), Natty Bumppo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Bumppo), Sherlock Holmes, Alan Quartermain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Quatermain ), Fu Manchu ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu ), Tarzan, Zorro, Doc Savage and The Shadow are earlier examples of heroes in paraliterature.
If you go back further, there are long series of books about medieval knights such as Amadis of Gaul ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadis_de_Gaula ) and Palmerin of England ( http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lrs/lrs07.htm ) and other such works.
Before that there are the genuine Arthurian tales, many of which are very formulaic and not of great interest.
The main change is that, perhaps starting with Amadis of Gaul, there was not even a pretence that the stories were true. Tales of Davey Crocket and other historical characters appeared in the Dime Novels ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel ) and the Penny Dreadfuls ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful ).
As to books today, there are books covering the adventures of Doctor Who, tales from Star Trek, tales from the Star Wars universe, Rick Rioden’s tales of Percy Jackson, tales from the DC comic universe, tales from the Marvel comic universe. See http://brainz.org/the-10-greatest-fantasy-series-all-time/ for a supposed list of the ten top fantasy series. It appears that for today’s audience hero fiction must mostly be fantasy or science fiction.
So don’t worry about literature. Just note that the Arthurian tales and the tales of Varney the Vampire and tales of Tarzan were all part of the junk literature of their day.
For every work that is to be considered later to be great literature there are hundreds that are mostly forgotten by the following generations.
There are differences. Even in Edgar Rice Burrough’s works on Tarzan and others the heroes are almost always of high birth. That is not so noticeable in works these days.
Heroic fiction was usually not considered to be high literature. In the realm of King Arthur there is Chrétien de Troyes' romances, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, and Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” which alone are widely known today. The epic cycle of the Geeks, except for the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” has not come down to us and seems not to have been greatly esteemed by the Greeks themselves.
If you try to stick to what the contemporary literary establishment considers high literature, you won’t find much.
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