ABSTRACT
The Robin Hood tradition has dipped in and out of a variety of literary and performance genres for hundreds of years. This wide range of material, and a preference for popular genres and media types, has resulted in Robin Hood’s fascinating absence from a mainstream literary (though not cinematic) canon that the collection of essays in this project address. This essay will contribute to the larger project by focusing on the modern Robin Hood romance novel because the romance novel is a literary genre whose negative relationship with mainstream high culture mirrors that of Robin Hood. Consequently, this essay will use the romance novel genre as a whole, and particular novels specifically, to examine and explore Robin Hood’s success on the periphery of mainstream literature. This essay will confront the gendered biases that academic reception of the romance novel unconsciously carries into consideration of Robin Hood as a worthy addition to the larger literary canon. Since romance novels are generally excluded from all considerations of what constitutes canonical material in the Robin Hood tradition, this essay will engage in a secondary argument that demonstrates the value of the romance novel as a responsive text, one which has foreshadowed many of the most interesting and enduring recent cinematic and novel additions to the tradition. To accomplish these goals, the essay will use Carrie Lofty’s What a Scoundrel Wants (2008) as a focused case study. The book is a romance novel which continually excerpts material from the Robin Hood tradition to structure and introduce its own narrative. Lofty’s romance demonstrates an impressive awareness of the Robin Hood tradition, engaging and binding that material to the romance through a patchwork approach to her sources, whether literary or cinematic. Lofty’s methods mirror those used in the Middle Ages to develop the Arthurian canon; her focus on romance, relationships, and complex plots further reflects the medieval products of the Arthurian canon. The novel features Will Scarlet, a peripheral though canonical character, and through this patchwork process inserts an otherwise minor character into a larger narrative tradition. Consequently, Lofty engages not only the literary Robin Hood tradition, but the cinematic and televised traditions as well. The novel draws on all three media to produce a work that will be read and enjoyed by modern romance novel readers; this group is critically understudied, though their reading and viewing experiences reciprocally extend into every literary and cinematic genre. These readers bring their experiences of Lofty’s novel to other Robin Hood material, thereby knitting together readers and viewers to create a new media tradition that challenges the dominance of the literary canon. This paper will therefore examine how a Robin Hood canon is created and carried forward, by using a genre that has been traditionally excluded from the literary canon, to question and examine what constitutes a “canon.”
