Abstract
Discusses the career and wide-ranging accomplishments of the Scottish essayist, poet and critic Andrew Lang (1844-1912), author of Myth, Ritual and Religion (2 vols., 1887), arguing that Lang was "an original thinker with a powerful oppositional streak;" reviews his significance for late Victorian anthropology and the studies of religions (including psychical research), and on his work as a translator and classicist, reviewer, ballad scholar, biographer, and Scottish historian, as well as his contribution to children's literature; includes an assessment of a new 2-volume selection of Lang's writing; and concludes that Lang's "virtuosic range" and "slashing keenness of intellect" "contributed significantly to the rediscovery of the 'primitive' during the early years of the 20th century, carrying us to within a step of Picasso’s savage masks, The Waste Land and The Rite of Spring."
Recommended Citation
Donaldson, William
(2017)
"Andrew Lang: A World We Have Lost,"
Studies in Scottish Literature:
Vol. 43:
Iss.
1, 155–165.
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol43/iss1/14
Included in
Anthropology Commons, Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons