Mythische Räume der Gesetzlosigkeit in Erzählungen über Robin Hood, Klaus Störtebeker und Jesse James

This book attends to three outlaw heroes from England, Germany, and North America. Robin Hood, Klaus Stoertebeker, and Jesse James still fascinate people today. The myth of the outlaw expresses social discourses about law and justice, government and resistance, and sovereignty and legitimacy. Stories in which robbers, pirates, or bandits advance to become rebels and heroes give literary form to the contradictions of the legal order. Law has a social and spatial aspect. The depiction of historio-spatial constellations in the narratives reveals how law is imagined as a social relation. This study of mythic spaces of lawlessness opens up a new perspective on the meaning of heroic outlawry as a phenomenon of social and spatial transgression.