In Seminar 8 of English Literature (Taylor's Version), titled 'Haters Gonna Hate: The Unlikeable Protagonist', we looked at the antihero, or deliberately unlikeable protagonist, in literature and culture. We tried to answer the question: what does it mean for Swift to self-identify as an antihero, in the twenty-first century? In order to do this, we looked at groundbreaking incarnations of the antihero in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) - subtitled 'A novel without a hero' - and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853). [Click above image to read more]