Heroism is usually associated with great deeds, and heroes are regarded as superior and powerful individuals who take action. This opinion has dominated Western tradition since ancient times. At the same, the ability to bide one’s time was and is equally classed as a heroic quality because it is an ‘inner form of action’ (M. Weber). Fabius Cunctator was heroicised for tactically biding his time during the Second Punic War, as were the front-line soldiers during the First World War, who held out for so long in the trenches. Moreover, the Christian notion of salvation, the heroic, eremitical act of waiting in this life for the next, or the prophetic, messianic constellations of the 1920s also spring to mind in this context.
The essays collected in this book examine ‘heroic waiting’ as a literary phenomenon. They not only provide in-depth analyses of how biding one’s time is conveyed as a heroic act, but also focus above all on how it is staged. The book’s introduction, which was written by the editors, is based on a collective set of descriptive tools with which ‘heroic waiting’ can be defined and understood in terms of its typological characteristics on the one hand and as a relational structure on the other.
