ABSTRACT
The legends of Havelock and Lawrence exemplify the imagining of the soldier as public hero under modern cultural conditions. Projective investments organized by historically specific cultural imaginaries assume public form in adventure narratives produced and circulated by the media of mass communication. Psychic and social determinants intersect in the composing and contesting of the soldier hero as an idealized figure of identification for vast public audiences. By examination of these processes, it is possible to analyse the historical imagining of particular forms of masculinity, to account for their popularity and to trace their persistence and transformation within changing social circumstances. But the precise mode of identification with the adventure hero - its take-up and use by boys and men as a lived form enabling particular kinds of subjective composure and relations to others - cannot be ascertained by studying these public forms alone. A different kind of analysis is necessary to account for what these forms feel like' from the inside, as 'private' imaginings, to those who invest in and inhabit them.
