An antihero (or antiheroine) is a protagonist who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, or morality.[1][2][3][4][5] These individuals often possess dark personality traits such as disagreeableness, dishonesty, and aggressiveness. These characters are usually considered "conspicuously contrary to an archetypal hero".[6]
The antihero archetype can be traced back at least as far as Homer's Thersites.[7] The concept has also been identified in classical Greek drama,[8] Roman satire, and Renaissance literature[7] such as Don Quixote[8][9] and the picaresque rogue.[10] Although antiheroes may sometimes do the "right thing", it is more because it serves their self-interest rather than being morally correct.[11]
The term antihero was first used as early as 1714,[5] emerging in works such as Rameau's Nephew in the 18th century,[12] and is also used more broadly to cover Byronic heroes as well.[13]
Literary Romanticism in the 19th century helped popularize new forms of the antihero,[14][15] such as the Gothic double.[16] The antihero eventually became an established form of social criticism, a phenomenon often associated with the unnamed protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.[17] The antihero emerged as a foil to the traditional hero archetype, a process that Northrop Frye called the fictional "centre of gravity."[18] This movement indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, as was the shift from epic to ironic narratives.[18]
The antihero entered American literature in the 1950s and up to the mid-1960s was portrayed as an alienated figure, unable to communicate.[23] The American antihero of the 1950s and 1960s (as seen in the works of Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, et al.) was typically more proactive than his French counterpart; with characters such as Kerouac's Dean Moriarty famously taking to the road to vanquish his ennui.[24] The British version of the antihero emerged in the works of the "angry young men" of the 1950s.[8][25] The collective protests of Sixties counterculture saw the solitary antihero gradually eclipsed from fictional prominence,[26] though not without subsequent revivals in literary and cinematic form.[27]
^Halliwell, Martin (2007). American Culture in the 1950s (Transferred to Digital Print 2012 ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. p. 60. ISBN 9780748618859.
^Laham, Nicholas (2009). Currents of Comedy on the American Screen: How Film and Television Deliver Different Laughs for Changing Times. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. p. 51. ISBN 9780786442645.
^Steiner, George (2013). Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. New York: Open Road. pp. 199–200. ISBN 9781480411913.
^Brereton, Geoffery (1968). A Short History of French Literature. Penguin Books. pp. 254–255.
^Hardt, Michael; Weeks, Kathi (2000). The Jameson Reader (Repr. ed.). Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. pp. 294–295. ISBN 9780631202707.
^Edelstein, Alan (1996). Everybody is Sitting on the Curb: How and why America's Heroes Disappeared. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. p. 18. ISBN 9780275953645.
^Ousby, Ian (1996). The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in English. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 27. ISBN 9780521436274.
^Edelstein, Alan (1996). Everybody is Sitting on the Curb: How and why America's Heroes Disappeared. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. p. 1. ISBN 9780275953645.
^Hardt, Michael; Weeks, Kathi (2000). The Jameson Reader (Repr. ed.). Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. p. 295. ISBN 9780631202707.
Further reading
Simmons, David (2008). The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-230-60323-8.