ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume examine material from the Middle Ages to the present, ranging from literature to digital art, opera and theater studies, cinema and archeology and history, all with varied national and cultural backgrounds. Drawn from projects presented at two conferences of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, and enhanced by scholarly conversations, these essays represent some of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the outlaw as “media creature” and, consequently, as a gure inhabiting and dened by outlaw/ed spaces.1 The volume is unied by a common thread to the outlaw at all stages of “his” or “her” history, highlighting a similarity of character as well as of cultural function inherent in the person and context of the “outlaw narrative.” Essential elements of the narratives, for example, include disguise, trickery, ofcial proscription, corrupt legality, and the overturning of accepted ideological imperatives and value/systems; similarly, the outlaw’s function as resister and challenger, a rebel as well as a freedom ghter, remains consistent.
