Robin Hood - Stephen Knight

Everybody 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 centralised 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, 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 radicalmystical to feminist farce.
Most accounts of Robin Hood merely retell stories or speculate upon the original bandits identity. But Knights new study, based on wide research 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 500 years.