Heroic Failure and the British
Stephanie Barczewski
Abstract
From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic and beyond, it seems as if glorious disaster and valiant defeat have been essential aspects of the British national character for the past two centuries. This book examines the evolution of British conceptions of heroism from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the prevalence of heroic failure in British culture. It argues that Britain's embrace of heroic failure initially helped to gloss over the moral ambiguities of imperial expansion. Later, it became a strategy for coming to terms ... More
Keywords: glorious disaster, valiant defeat, British character, heroic failure, imperial expansion, diminishment, loss, British culture, Britain
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 | Print ISBN-13: 9780300180060 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: September 2016 | DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300180060.001.0001 |
