“One Step Beyond the Hero”: Disrupting War and Violence in American Literature and Culture Collected Essays

The essays collected in this volume were written over the last twenty or so years and were all originally published (with one exception) in a variety of journals and edited collections. The topics covered range from contemporary Native American literature to war literature and cinema, from the revisionist Western film to the prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers who struggled to think of peace as something different from the peace that can be safeguarded by an unending preparedness for war. As a whole, this book attempts to gauge to what extent both film and narrative can point in the direction of that “one step beyond the hero” which Emerson (in his early years) saw as necessary to becoming true peace fighters. Though “One Step Beyond the Hero” shows how difficult it is to imagine (let alone realize) a world free of violence, brutality, and coercion, its goal is not to undermine the Utopian desire for a non-violent future. On the contrary, by calling attention to how writers and filmmakers deal with both violence and war, this study engages in a critical scrutiny of culture based on the notion that peace should be another word for justice.