Let's Talk Romance: The Romantic Hero and Universalism

I'm feeling my way through this topic without any formal academic understanding of Postmodernism itself, but I think it's an important point, at least one that's caused a couple of heated discussions between me and my "Po-mo is the Mo-fo" boyfriend.

When I talk about the Romantic/Byronic hero, I tend to make references to mythological/literary male characters that existed before the Romantic Period - Cain and Milton's Satan are two of my favourites. Jon's argument is that one can't look back with modern perceptions and label something that would not have been labeled at the time. The analogy that he uses, and one that makes sense to me, is to look at, say, ancient Greece and call the men homosexuals. Homosexuality as a term did not exist until thousands of years after this period; homosexuality itself did not exist until we defined it. So to look at, say, Cain, and define him as a Romantic hero does not really work, because Romantic heroes didn't exist until the Romantic Period.

I have trouble wrapping my head around this in some ways, because I know a Romantic hero when I see one. I recognize the combination of characteristics, the "character type" and I don't care whether the character was created thousands of years before Byron started writing or not. At the same time, this argument has made me realize something important -- the Romantic hero is not a thing. The Romantic hero is a perception. That's why I can look at Cain and see a Romantic hero and others in different time periods, including the one in which the Bible was written, can see him as a monster. He's the same character, with the same characteristics, but he can be perceived in different ways. Therefore, what I am interested in is the perception of characters -- Cain, Satan, Lestat, and so many others -- in a certain way, not in whether or not they written deliberately as such or whether there is something inherently "Romantic" in their makeup. It's modern perception that I'm interested in, and possibly Nineteenth-Century perception as well (since that is when the Romantic hero became a noticed a popular thing, and people began to actively create them). Maybe I'm interested in perception starting in the Nineteenth-Century and moving up to Contemporary. I'm really not sure of anything yet, but it's all so damned exciting!