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This essay traces the strikingly prolific career of Andrew Lang and places that career in the context of the shifting late-Victorian literary field, which Lang served importantly to shape. The essay introduces Lang’s milieu and re-orients readers to a literary personality who, while known, is only rarely studied in his own right—a detail of reception history the essay explains with recourse to the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour. Restoring Lang’s “network effect” through historical analysis helps raise a number of conceptual questions, each of which is pursued in the essays of this special issue: such questions include the nature of textual interpretation, the changing outlines of disciplines, the philosophy of historical method, and conceptions of authorship and collaboration in the modern cultural marketplace. Placing Lang back in his proper spot at the center of the late-Victorian networks he helped convene (1) helps historicize our understanding of the modern “field of cultural production” (Bourdieu’s term) in an expanded, protodisciplinary sense and (2) discloses new genealogies of literary and theoretical history. These new genealogies in turn cast altered light on the methodological presuppositions we draw upon to evaluate Lang and his network here. “Theoretical historicism” is the term used to describe approaches that trace such feedback loops between the historical object analyzed and the modern method used to analyze them.

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This essay examines the role Andrew Lang played in the circulation of ideas within and among the fields of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lang popularized anthropologist Edward Tylor’s theories about myth, and championed them against those of the philologist Max Müller. He provided the occasion for novelist H. Rider Haggard’s engagement with these ideas in the novel She, which Haggard dedicated to him, and he drew upon these theories of myth in essays that explain the value of Haggard’s novels. Finally, both Haggard’s novel and Lang’s anthropological writing shaped the work of Sigmund Freud. Attention to Lang’s role as a transmitter of the ideas of others across genres and disciplines allows us to see how central the problem of interpretation was to the disciplinary formation of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis.

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Andrew Lang represents an alternative model to the cult of the solo literary genius that occupied so much of the Victorian literary landscape, a model that is defined by collaboration and coterie production, and one that troubles the rigidities of discipline and genre. This essay, with Lang at its core, throws into relief the extent to which all authorship is a collective endeavor between forms and across time. While Lang’s entire oeuvre is important, this essay is most interested in his work on the fairy tale. For this essay, Lang is one practitioner of a kind of discourse generated in the wake of the Victorian fairy tale surge—the widespread incorporation of fairy tales into other Victorian literary and cultural forms like theater, fine arts, and literature. What a fairy tale was, and to whom or to what it belonged, were questions that frequently ran through contemporary discourse about literary production, like the copyright debates, the plagiarism debates, and the ongoing discussion about whether social science writing was or was not a kind of creative work. Lang’s treatment of the fairy tale, especially in his popular Colored Fairy Books, places him at the end of this century-long conversation about the nature of originality. This essay considers how Lang’s position at the center of multiple, linked networks might owe something, or everything, to his play with the fairy tale, arguably the most “networked” of forms. Lang’s very interdisciplinarity can help us to understand the extent to which the fairy tale’s language, figures, structure, authors, and methods of production had come to influence other forms of cultural production and consumption.

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This paper examines the metaphors used in Andrew Lang’s 1887 Longman’s Magazine article “Literary Plagiarism,” arguing that Lang repeatedly describes ideas as if they are objects in order to frame the late-nineteenth-century plagiarism debate as a discussion of the best use of materials. Lang’s slippage between abstract, intangible ideas and “the material of literature” (833) enabled him to circumvent a discussion about access to publishing networks. This paper suggests that this episode exposes a concrete historical backstory for recent developments in thing theory, and suggests that the latter recapitulates in a philosophical register debates about the economics of literary publishing taking place in the late nineteenth century.

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This article examines Andrew Lang’s anthropological writings on magic and religion in relation to a broader network of literary and sociological discourses. Lang’s work, along with that of others, highlights the labors nineteenth-century anthropologists expended to segregate magic from science, religion, and utilitarian action in the capitalist public sphere. Despite such efforts at segregation, however, nineteenth-century anthropological writings expose the genealogical continuities between magic, science, religion, and self-interest. These continuities, the essay contends, also surface in anthropology’s sibling discourses: literature and political economy. Lang’s contemporaries, such as H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, drew on anthropological findings in their fictional representations of magical rites and beliefs either in rural Britain or at the colonial periphery. Magic’s proximity to science, religion, and capitalist self-interest also undergirds Herbert Spencer’s systems theories and reverberates in the political economists that drew on Spencer’s work. The essay thus demonstrates not only how Lang functions as a node within a broad disciplinary network, but also how the concept of magic traverses numerous discursive fields.

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Andrew Lang’s ideas on the nature and sources of originality seem fated for renewed attention due to the ways they appear to have forecast or anticipated modern attempts to get beyond the celebration of individual creativity. But rather than simply illustrating recent theoretical truisms, Lang’s formulations, whether developed in his writings on myth or in his texts devoted to literary topics, present subtle and not easily resolved challenges to attempts to dissolve individuality and agency into a greater communal whole. For Lang, because the effective use of material from the past to arrive at new forms is the measure of individual creativity, no work can ever make a claim to absolute originality. However, the prestige of the author, though hedged about by survivals from a lost past, is not for that reason lost. To recognize the tension between inherited material and new achievement is to begin to do justice to the historical place and conceptual force of the Andrew Lang effect.