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Canonical Heroes Redefined For Postmodern Readership, Catey Bayse

Senior Theses

"The 'hero' has figured as an important archetypal construction throughout literary history that has evolved over centuries. Instead of tracing the evolution of the hero chronologically, this essay will present a postmodern reading of the hero in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Homer’s Iliad by rereading those texts through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through this retrospective reading, heroic construction comes to mean something different than it does to classicists or Romanticists. In his construction of Leopold Bloom as the everyman, modern hero, Joyce is unconcerned with physical strength, youth, honor, virtue, lineage, or glory. Rather, Joyce constructs Bloom as a hero …