HE-MAN IN LITERATURE

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3304, 2 June 1931, Page 2

HE-MAN IN LITERATURE

“ From the earliest times straight down to the twentieth century literature was devoted mainly to the cult of the hero. Ninety-nine per cent of the fiction of the past centred about the doings of some strong-hearted and usually strong-armed male, an incarnation, more or less complete, of the ideals of the period, fighting as light against darkness, good against evil,” writes Louise Maunsell Field in the North American Review. “From Gilgamesh, Rama, Hercules, and all the other heroes of the ancient world, through' the * Morte d’Arthur ’ and the romances of Roland and the Cid, the line runs uninterrupted as far as the later 1920’5. Then suddenly it breaks and nearly vanishes. The all but complete disappearance of the hero is one of the most remarkable, most arresting phenomena of the present day. Not only has the hero vanished, but his place as protagonist is being assigned to the poor fish, who

only too often isn’t even a respectably back-boned aquatic individual, but a mere jelly-fish.”