A Hero and Some Other Folks

The hero is not a luxury but a necessity. So argues William A. Quayle in this impassioned late-Victorian meditation on what makes humanity worthy of itself. Through luminous readings of Jean Valjean and other figures, Quayle insists that we cannot do without heroes any more than we can do without sky. Every noble aspiration finds its avatar in the hero, that towering figure who makes our own small courage visible to ourselves. Quayle traces the evolution from classical heroism to its modern incarnation, mourning what he sees as the fading of conscience and moral daring in contemporary idols. Yet he finds redemption's living example in Valjean's transformation from convict to saint. These essays pulse with Victorian earnestness, arguing that heroes matter because they reveal what we might become.