| Modern national consciousness comes into being through largely fictional narratives that erase contradictions, defuse paradoxes and fill in discursive gaps, as the halting, stumbling steps through which a national identity is formed are transformed into a logical, linear, seemingly inevitable progression. As imaginary constructs that depend for their existence upon an elaborate apparatus of cultural fictions, nation-states rely heavily upon literature, which is primarily responsible for preserving the stories of a nation's origins, and for tracing its evolution through glorious tales of its history. Hence the importance of the numerous texts concerned with King Arthur and Robin Hood, two of Britain's oldest and greatest national heroes, for the construction of British national identity in the nineteenth century.;These two legends provide excellent windows through which to view contemporary British culture, because they provide very different perspectives. For King Arthur and Robin Hood have traditionally been diametrically opposed in terms of their ideological orientation. One is a king, a man at the pinnacle of the political and social hierarchy, whereas the other is an outlaw, and thus completely outside of--and potentially subversive to--any conventional hierarchical structure. The fact that two such different figures could simultaneously function as national heroes suggests that nineteenth-century British nationalism did not represent a single set of values and ideals, but rather that it was forced to combine a variety of competing points of view. This thesis uses the divergence between the two legends to investigate some of these conflicts and complexities, including questions of race, gender and class and their relation to national identity. |
