Name: Ruth Baldwin

Title: "Scott's Extra-textual Outlaws"

Abstract: This essay comes out of a dissertation chapter-in-progress on the outlaws of Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Ivanhoe. I look at these two historical novels in the context of late eighteenth-century gothic novels, exploring the ways in which the outlaw figures function as extra-textual narrative motors, advancing the central romances while remaining largely outside the focus of the narrative themselves. I am interested in the increasing tendency, at this period in novel history, for authors to incorporate existing criminal myths into the margins of the romantic plot. In this essay, I focus on Ivanhoe and its appropriation and re-invention of the Robin Hood myth.