The Outlaw and The Popular /Folk Hero: A Review Article

Abstract

This is a generous and powerful treatment of the authority-defiant figure across many cultures and centuries. While Graham Seal's major work to date has been largely concerned with medieval England and colonial Australia, this is a fine and world-ranging survey, and a study presented with a compassionate identification and with a pleasing wit. It is, quite simply, Australia's finest national and comparative volume in the global scholarship of the folkloric discipline. What more is there to say about outlaw heroes? A great deal, it turns out. While many might have considered the tradition of the outlawed hero to have died out, it has not only endured, but has evolved into viable new forms; the cultural processes that produce and contain the outlaw hero as a viable model of resistance are not only ancient, extensive and deep, but are also socially perilous.