Introduction

Howard Pyle, an American artist and writer, published The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire in 1883. The novel gathers conventional material into a coherent narrative in a colourful, imagined "old English" vernacular that keeps some taste of the ballads while adapting it for children, and it consists of a sequence of scenes in the storey of the English bandit Robin Hood and his gang of Merry Men. The work is remarkable for taking the topic of Robin Hood, which had grown in popularity throughout the nineteenth century, in a fresh direction that impacted subsequent writers, painters, and filmmakers into the twentieth century.