Robin Hood

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This text details and analyzes the phenomenon of Robin Hood, his resistance to authority and how successive ages have interpreted him. The author suggests that in the late Middle Ages, Robin Hood was seen simply as an opponent of centralized law, whilst the Elizabethans recruited him to oppose a corrupt church. During the Restoration he came to personify treason against an anointed king. To Walter Scott, Robin was a Saxon freedom fighter, but to Keats he was a vision of an imaginatively freer time. 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 figure of democracy. Knight's study, based on literary and sociocultural research, provides an analytic account of this figure, the English outlaw hero who has symbolized resistance to authority around the world for over 500 years.