This book critically examines how a Hero is made, sustained, and even deformed, in contemporary cultures. It brings together diverse ideas from philosophy, mythology, religion, literature, cinema, and social media to explore how heroes are constructed across genres, mediums, and traditions.

The essays in this volume present fresh perspectives for readers to conceptualize the myriad possibilities the term Hero brings with itself. They examine the making and unmaking of the heroes across literary, visual and social cultures in religious spaces and in classical texts; in folk tales and fairy tales; in literature, as seen in Heinrich Bolls Und Sagte Kein Einziges Wort, Thomas Brussigs Heroes like Us, and in movies, like Christopher Nolans Interstellar, Michel Gondrys Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in the short film like Dean Potter's When Dogs Fly. The volume also features nuanced takes on intersectional feminist representations in hero movies; masculinity in sports biopics; taking everyday heroes from the real to the reel, among others key themes.

A stimulating work that explores the mechanisms that manufacture heroes, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, film studies, media studies, literary and critical theory, arts and aesthetics, political sociology and political philosophy.