Literary Case Studies in Cowardice: Parolles, Waller, and Hirsch

This book offers case studies from throughout literature to reveal cowardice as a more complex and interesting phenomenon than typically understood. Pushing beyond the straightforward treatment of cowardice in military contexts and others where it is subject to punishment or severe condemnation, Hillyer asks: how do cowards survive in a world generally hostile to them and why do they attract such wide vituperation? Following a lexical and literary overview of cowardice starting with the Oxford English Dictionary to provide a big picture, chapters provide deep dives into specific cowardly character representatives, including Shakespeare’s Parolles (All’s Well That Ends Well), English poet and politician Edmund Waller, and Joseph Conrad’s Hirsch (Nostromo).

Richard Hillyer is Professor of English at University of South Alabama, USA. His previous books include Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin (2020), Auden’s Syllabic Verse (2020), Divided between Carelessness and Care: A Cultural History (2013), Sir Philip Sydney, Cultural Icon (2010), and Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries: Cultural Transmission in Early Modern England (2007).