Andrew Teverson, Alexandra Warwick, and Leigh Wilson assess the opus of Andrew Lang (1844-1912) as “simply unmanageable, both in the volume of his production and in its variety” (vol. 1, 10). Of primary interest to folklorists, volume 1 includes a careful selection of Lang’s writings, divided into the following sections: 1. The Methods of Folklore; 2. Anthropology and Folklore; 3. Fairy Tales; 4. Anthropology and the Origins of Religion; 5. Anthropology and Psychical Research; and 6. Psychical Research.

The reader interested in intellectual history will be drawn to volume 2, where the editors flesh out Lang’s ambivalence to his time and place: his assessment of the end of the nineteenth century as “not a great age,” and the literature of this period as being in decline but not permanently so (vol. 2, 19). His diffidence extended to politics and to his Scottish identity. In November 1899, he wrote of England, “This country has gone to the devil: I expect to end my days . . . under the Stars and Stripes” (vol. 2, 22). In volume 2, the editors divide Lang’s works into the following sections, 1. Critics and Criticism; 2. Realism, Romance, and the Reading Public; 3. On Writers and Writing; 4. Scotland, History and Biography; and 5. The Business and Institutions of Literary Life. Volume 2 ends with a selection of letters from Lang to Oliver Lodge, William James, and E. B. Tylor (314-33).

As the editors surmise, Lang possessed “an almost pathological” desire for privacy (vol. 1, 13). He consistently instructed people to burn his letters, “or some beast will publish it, some day, for ten bob.” He also instructed his wife “to destroy all his papers after his death” (vol. 1, 13). Lang’s quest to efface the personal through destruction of his letters and manuscripts, coupled with the vastness of his opus, renders a less-than-complete portrait of Lang for the scholars of the twenty-first century. “These two volumes,” the editors write, “are an attempt to address that neglect and to enable his work to be read in a new light; one that shows him in a crucial place in turn-of-the-century intellectual life” (vol. 1, 14). Mindful of Lang’s vast number of publications and his expansive areas of interest, the editors have intentionally selected “the pieces most representative of Lang’s originality and complexity,” and those that illustrate “his position on contemporary topics of debate (vol. 1, 14-15).

Teverson, Warwick, and Wilson argue convincingly that Lang was on the borders of emerging disciplines, and that he eschewed the assignment of his works to specific approaches. Born in the border country of Scotland, Lang maintained his outsider status in his academic and intellectual life. “Lang felt himself to be a Scot,” the editors write, “a member, as he puts it, of a ‘small nationality’ and never entirely at home in England” (vol. 1, 11). Lang’s self-image and self-imposed maintenance of marginality is crucial for understanding his place in intellectual history. The editors write, “In the late nineteenth century the sciences and other disciplines were struggling for definition, working for greater clarity of boundaries and objects of study rather than less. Lang’s refusal of such segregation placed him awkwardly in the intellectual milieu of his own time and further stranded his work as those boundaries between academic disciplines hardened in the twentieth century” (vol. 1, 11). Now, over a hundred years later, a growing interest in his works has rendered “Lang anew as the complicated and sometimes contradictory scholar that he was, both a Victorian man of letters and one who worked in and on the boundaries between subjects in a way that anticipated the interdisciplinary studies of the later twentieth century” (iol. 1, 11).

The editors meticulously develop Lang’s “longevity” of interest and the variety of his intellectual interests (vol. 1, 12) both through what they write about Lang and through the selection of his writings. With early publications in folklore and interest in psychical study, he also consistently worked in classical studies. Lang’s interest in anthropology began when he was at St. Andrews and lasted throughout his life, but he “maintained a complex and ambiguous relation to the discipline” (vol. 1, 20).

“A Note on Text” (vol. 1, 52; vol. 2, 52) is illustrative of the editors’ precise scholarly adherence to Lang’s original text. Each section in volumes 1 and 2 is preceded by the editors’ headnote, which succinctly provides the bibliographical, disciplinary, and intellectual background of Lang’s writings included in the section. Volumes 1 and 2 both have an appendix, “Names frequently cited by Lang” (vol. 1, 335-55; vol. 2, 307-26); and volume 1 also has an appendix on “Ethnic groups cited by Lang” (vol. 1, 357-60).

Lang persistently insisted on his outsider status, to which the editors attribute “the lack of attention to his legacy; his refusal of allegiance meant that no school saw him as ‘one of their own’ and continued to tend to his memory” (vol. 1, 14). While the editors present an unassailable case for Lang’s desire to remain on the margins, I wonder about the editors’ insistence that Lang lies outside of memory and notice in folklore and anthropology. Decidedly, this is not the case for folklorists, and certainly not for historians of anthropology. The editors miss a beat when they include folklorists and historians of anthropology in the following: “His vast body of work is little known and he is consistently relegated to the footnotes of all the disciplines in which he wrote” (vol. 1, 14). However, the two-volume work of Teverson, Warwick, and Wilson provides excellent evidence for Lang’s import to the study of folklore, anthropology, and religious studies.

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[Review length: 942 words • Review posted on September 20, 2016]