[3] His areas of expertise include medieval English and European literature, Robin Hood, Merlin, cultural studies, crime fiction, and Australian matters.
This book, which won the 2005 International Mythopoeic Society Award for Non-Fiction,[11] traces the origins of the myth, providing insights into why Robin Hood is still such an essential and evolving figure in culture and literature.
The book covers French and German as well as Anglophone elements of the myth and brings the story up to the present with discussions of a globalised Merlin who finds his way into popular literature, film, television, and New Age philosophy.
Starting with Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1842-3) it shows how young authors, working for newspapers and street level publishers, did not use the new power of detectives or the old patterns of aristocratic and moral control, and simply realised the multiple, overlapping, chaotic and often violent stories of modern urban crime.
Knight shows how this material expresses and examines the drama of new megalopolitan life, how it influenced authors who sometimes claimed not to admire it such as Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and Émile Zola, and how this genre is a massively overlooked storehouse of story, melodrama and above all urban emotional history.
In 1997 Knight published Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction, a study of the genre up to 1995 which focused on separate themes, with chapters on Origins, Women, Police, Place, and Colonial/Post-Colonial.
Reynolds has been almost completely ignored by English literary criticism, in part because of his popular status, but also because of his politics: he was a Chartist and general supporter of the lower social orders, especially seeking their improved education.
[citation needed] Knight has appeared in the media many times, producing reviews for newspapers, magazines and radio, including for ten years from the mid-1970s a monthly column in The Sydney Morning Herald on crime fiction.