Robin Hood: a mythic biography

✍ Scribed by Stephen Knight

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 280
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The only figure in the Dictionary of National Biography who is said never to have existed, Robin Hood has taken on an air of reality few historical figures achieve. His image in various guises have been put to use as a subject of ballads, a nationalist rallying point, Disney cartoon fox, greenclad figure of farce, tabloid fodder, and template for petty criminals and progressive political candidates alike.

In this book Stephen Knight looks at the different manifestations of Robin Hood in different places and times. The best way to get at the essence of the Robin Hood myth, Knight believes, is in terms not of chronological and generic progression but of the purposes served by heroes. Each of the book's four central chapters identifies a particular model of the hero, mythic or biographic, that dominated in certain periods and in certain genres, and explores their interrelations, their implications, and their historical and sociopolitical contexts.