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The legend of Shivaji contains several narratives on his victories, raids, and escapes that always showcase his nobility and virtue. These stories are well known in Maharashtra, and they seem to point out how Shivaji is to be seen as an epitome as he possesses the region's utmost ideals. Shivaji is seen not just a man with profound courage and bravery but also as an administrator, someone who advocates social reform, a patriotic, and even as a mystic. This book attempts to understand the kind of hero Shivaji was in a Maharashtrian setting, and look into how the growth of this legend can be associated with Maharashtrian Hindu identity by examining the narrative of the legend, identifying clues of how Shivaji became an epic hero, and looking at the challenges that such a narrative may encounter.

This chapter discusses Indo-European narratives of kings and heroes. Linguistic evidence shows that kingship was an Indo-European institution. However, there was no Indo-European word for ‘hero’, and the hero is a creation of narrative art. Topics covered include kings, the queen, king and horse, king and priest, qualities of a king, the hero in dialogue, the hero and women, and the hero and his son.

This chapter highlights the role of international and regional cultures in shaping our behaviors toward others. The influence of worthy and unworthy sports heroes on their admirers is examined with regard to aggression. The actions of third parties are shown to be capable of directly or indirectly influencing levels of aggression in others. A large majority of people are shown to be obedient to authority figures, even following orders to ostensibly harm another person. Large-scale disorders are frequently found to have originated with exceedingly petty provocations that escalate to violence. Gender, racial, and occupational groups are often targets for aggression by others holding stereotypical attitudes.

Political stories are all about heroes. It is because Barack Obama could not be a hero in south Chicago's black community that he lost that long-ago congressional race. Only by losing could Obama become a hero on the larger historical stage. There is a purpose to a hero's life. It is this goal that defines an arc stretching from the past to the future via the present, moving the heroes and the greater causes for which they fight from earlier despair to contemporary redemption and on to future glory. Persons who become heroes are predestined to traverse this rainbow arch. This is what the plot to their story is all about. This chapter discusses the hero's predestination and redemption, crisis and salvation, and the suffering and redemption of John McCain. In the campaign for the presidency, McCain played Achilles to Obama's Hector, even if the outcome of their epic confrontation inverted the tragic ending Homer earlier prescribed.

It is a risk worth taking to consider the strategist as hero, so challenging is the function that is his uniquely, properly conceived as a whole, as strategic performance which is command performance. The strategist's mission is far more difficult than are those of the policymaker and the tactician. Fortunately for the strategist, he can find educational value in an eternal general theory of strategy. Less fortunately, though, he must always adapt the dicta of that general theory for detailed application in the strategy he needs for his today. Clausewitz alone is excellent as a guide, but even as a general education in strategy the great Prussian is not sufficient for the twenty‐first century, but he does come close. Through all of history, the challenges that we expressed generically in the strategic function of ‘ends, ways, and means’ have not altered. It is well to be alert to the reality that although every strategy must be a plan, formal or informal, not all plans truly will be strategies. Strategic theory helps the practicing strategist to think competently with discipline about his complex subject; theory sorts things out rigorously. Strategy is far more art than science, by any plausible definition. It is difficult, but nonetheless can be, and has been, practiced successfully. The practice of strategy is effected by command performance that has to be severally enabled. By way of important caveats, strategy as ideas and as practiced by command, can be hampered by the misuse of historical analogy; a neglect of the vital human factor; a reified strategism that exalts unduly the potential benefits of strategy; a ‘presentism’ that plans for tomorrow in a manner that is unwisely hostage to the leading concerns of today; and an improperly autarchic view of strategy, one which neglects the quintessential instrumentality of the strategic function.

This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two less equivocally satirical modernists by way of counter‐arguments to this objection. Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man contains some of the most forceful modernist attacks on the auto/biographic; yet Lewis offers the book as itself a kind of intellectual self‐portrait. Conversely, Richard Aldington's Soft Answers is read as a portrait‐collection, adopting modernist parodies of auto/biography in order to satirize modernists such as Eliot and Pound. It argues that (as in the case of Pound, and according to the argument introduced in the Preface) not only can satire be auto/biography, but auto/biography can also be satire. Indeed, Pound was shown in Chapter 9 to be writing both in verse; and in the Chapter 11 Woolf is shown to do both in prose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the First World War transformed the crisis in life ‐ writing.

This chapter considers in detail the meaning and power attributed by the Victorians to ‘hero‐worship’. The endless debates devoted to the topic in periodicals reveal that there was little consensus on the subject, which in turn opened up the boundaries of biography. Much of the dissent on the subject can be attributed to the contributions of Thomas Carlyle: Carlyle undoubtedly fuelled the nineteenth‐century fascination with ‘Great Men’, but his lectures On Heroes, Hero‐Worship, and The Heroic in History, historical works, and biographical essays indicate that he was equally attracted to ‘the noble silent men’. Carlyle demonstrated the historical and artistic power of such lives, and in doing so influenced numerous biographers. One of these was Samuel Smiles, whose works of collective biography reveal a similar tendency to vacillate between the appeal of famous and unknown men.

This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.

This chapter traces the history of mathematics, from the late sixteenth century to the present, through the lens of mathematical stories. The period is divided into three main epochs and a possible fourth, each characterized by a different dominant mathematical story, which in turn is related to a different dominant mathematical style. Each period reveals one or several dominant narratives that enjoyed wide currency not only among the broader population but also among practicing mathematicians. The chapter examines the transition of mathematics from the older narratives, spanning the Enlightenment and the exploration mathematics periods, to the time of tragic mathematical heroes such as Évariste Galois and Georg Cantor.

This chapter explores the question of whether corporate leaders should be considered as cultural heroes. It seeks to determine whether top leaders are different from other older workers through prominence alone. The chapter argues in that there is one quality that sets leaders apart and that is their career development as folk heroes. The “ heroic” activities of modern-day chief executives, their role in concrete decision-making, and their symbolic representations of corporate leadership are examined. After establishing that chief executives may, at the least, serve heroic roles within the cultures of their own firms, the chapter considers the powerful tradition of heroes in American culture from the cornfield to the battlefield, arriving eventually at the door of the executive suite. Further, five personal qualities common to American business heroes and how they satisfy society's thirst for such heroism are discussed.

Special psychological barriers to career exit that business heroes face are suggested in this chapter. These include the feared loss of heroic stature and loss of the sense of heroic mission. This chapter also presents how these barriers can be lessened or heightened depending on the environment of the heroes' firms. The chapter also introduces four types of departure styles of retiring business leaders, namely: monarchs, generals, ambassadors, and governors, as well as a variety of methods used to overcome the barriers to retirement. Also included in this chapter are key findings from a chief executive survey and an analysis of compustat data.

Musical London will scarcely have recovered from its state of bewilderment over Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben before the second performance. The first impression is that Strauss's artistic position is not altered by this work. His great strength is his mastery over tones; he has chosen most happily when he calls his work a “Tone-Poem.” Whatever one may think of Ein Heldenleben as music, one must admit the newness, the power, and the extreme beauty of the sounds that proceed from the Straussian orchestra. Strauss's weakness lies in the fact that he is so often content with commonplaces as the germs of his inspiration. He is like a cook who can serve up mutton with such art that he does not always take the trouble to look out for venison. The work is divided into six sections; each, according to the Queen's Hall programme, duly labeled “The Hero,” “His Enemies,” and so on.

This chapter discusses depictions of heroic activity in battle in Indo-European tradition. Topics covered include the war-band, strongholds, the hero as warrior, weapons, horses, battle narratives, speeches, similes, and the hero's funeral.

Civil religion uses public religiosity, national holidays, and public education to guard against deviant and autonomous expressions of individualism. Civil religion seeks to co‐opt the heroes and celebrities, both living and dead, as representatives and defenders of the social order. However, in societies that lose their monopoly on the sacred, heroes and celebrities represent hitherto forbidden or hidden possibilities for selfhood and satisfaction. The less successful the churches and the nation are in institutionalizing the sacred, the less likely individuals are to surrender their autonomy in return for recognition and support from the larger society.

E. A. Freeman maintained that he always sought the truth in his historical research. He asserted that ‘personal theories’ and ‘national prejudices’ had no place in the study of history, but did his actions always match the rhetoric? This essay focuses on Freeman’s hero-worship of Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king, and his quest to prove Harold’s link with Waltham Abbey. This quest became a personal obsession which was to embroil him in a controversy which, many have argued, led him to compromise his academic principles and to allow ‘romantic nationalism’ to get in the way of the objective search for truth.