num_pages: 308
description: What emerges very clearly is the extraordinary power and diversity of the material. Again and again the reader is encouraged to look at well-known works in a fresh and invigorating way or to explore unknown but fascinating areas. Knight is open-minded and generous. I find it all very persuasive. - Professor Douglas Gray, University of OxfordBy no means indifferent to the romantic lore of the myth of the outlaw, Stephen Knight here provides an analysis of Robin Hood that is at once sympathetic and critical, warmly humane and politically astute - and remarkably thorough. This excellent book will fascinate and instruct all who have responded to the enduring fantasy of noble lawlessness. - Professor Robert Lee Patterson, Yale UniversityEverybody has heard of Robin Hood, but very few know about the wealth of materials which record and develop the tradition that sustains the myth. in this book Stephen Knight details and analyses the entire phenomenon of the outlaw, his resistance to authority, and how successive ages have interpreted him.Knight shows how in the late Middle Ages Robin Hood was seen simply as an opponent of centralized law, while the Elizabethans gentrified him to support the aristocracy and to oppose a corrupt Catholic church, and then at the Restoration he came to personify treason against an anointed king. To Walter Scott, Robin was a Saxon freedom fighter, but for Keats he was a vision of an imaginatively freer time. Tennyson and the Georgian poets found in their hero a symbolic escape from oppressive modernity, while Hollywood, at its most vigorous - and elitist - made Robin Hood a doubtful figure of democracy. More recently he has focused forms as disparate as Disney comedy and the historical novel, as well as television versions ranging from the radical-mystical to feminist farce.Most accounts of Robin Hood merely retell stories or speculate upon the original bandit's identity. But Knight's new study, based on wide and sophisticated literary and sociocultural research, is the first complete analytic account of this major mythic figure, the English outlaw hero who has symbolized many forms of resistance to authority around the world for over five hundred years.
language: English
title: Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw
titlecomplete: Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw
characters: Robin Hood
genres: Nonfiction, History, Medieval
ratings_count: 19
places: England
publisher: Blackwell Publishers