ABSTRACT
The introduction to the volume Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture discusses the ways in which heroism has increasingly become a global, multicentred, transnational, and transcultural phenomenon. It argues that in an age of globalization, heroic figures transcend their cultural spheres of origin and are rerouted, re-rooted, adapted, and translated in new local contexts across the world. It discusses the historiographical and theoretical insights and blind spots of scholarship on heroism, globalization, postcolonial studies, and translation studies; it summarizes the findings of the volume’s contributions; and suggests avenues for future research on the global dimensions of the heroic. In particular, it highlights the complex and interrelated processes of creation, marketing, consumption, and impact of globalized hero narratives, and identifies some of the cultural flows of exchange that have made these processes possible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
