culture hero

Definitions

A mythical character or real person who is renowned as the exemplar of the values or achievements of a society, group, or time period.

idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“A precisely similar notion was found by Avila among the Indians of Huarochiri, whose divine culture-hero imposed, by a curse or a blessing, their character and habits on the beasts.”

“[T]he U.S. has long been the Land⟳ of Efficiency. . . . Here mass production was born, the assembly line for good or ill became the modern cornucopia, and Henry Ford once reigned as the leading culture hero.”

“[T]hese were mostly Russian intellectuals, hard-core Stalinists, and democratic socialists . . . whose book-lined apartments were filled with leftist tracts and records by the Red Army Chorus and the black American Communist culture hero Paul Robeson.”

CEFR level