The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume I: Folklore, Mythology, Anthropology: General and Theoretical ed. by Tom Hubbard, and: The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume II: Folklore, Mythology, Anthropology: Case Studies ed. by Tom Hubbard, and: The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume III: Literary Criticism ed. by Tom Hubbard (review)

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was an inescapable presence on the late-Victorian and Edwardian literary scene: the period's busiest and most influential reviewer, literary advisor of Longman's Magazine, scholar of Homeric epic, advocate of folklore studies, and popularizer of Edward Burnett Tylor's cultural anthropology, Lang exemplified the ascendant type of professional man of letters or bookman whose natural habitat was the proliferating magazine culture of the fin-de-siècle media landscape. Despite his influence, he is scarcely read now, even by period specialists, and if he is remembered at all it is for his colored Fairy Books (1889–1913), much of the work on which was done by his wife. There are signs, however, of a revival of interest: Nathan K. Hensley and Molly Clark Hillard edited an excellent set of essays (by Kathy Psomiades, Hillard, Letitia Henville, Supritha Rajan, and Jonah Siegel) for a 2013 special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, and Hensley's recent book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), includes a fascinating discussion of Lang and H. Rider Haggard (chapter 4).

Lang played a crucial role in Haggard's career as mentor and advocate, promoting King Solomon's Mines (1885) and its animating principle of romance revival, as well as the work of their contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson. Lang's best-known literary essay, "Realism and Romance" (Contemporary Review, 1887), defends the adventure fiction of Haggard and Stevenson against the realist and naturalist psychological fiction of Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henry James. Together with the debate between James and Stevenson in "The Art of Fiction" and "A Humble Remonstrance," respectively (both published in Longman's in 1884), Lang's essay marks an aesthetic and social fissure in novel criticism that anticipates the so-called Great Divide between mass culture and high modernism. That later development fixed Lang on the wrong side of the debate, due as much to the rival critical formations coalescing around it as to the prestige that accrued to the so-called realists. This is Tom Hubbard's argument in his general introduction to this three-volume selection of Lang's writings, The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume I: Folklore, Mythology, Anthropology: General and Theoretical; Volume II: Folklore, Mythology, Anthropology: Case Studies; and Volume III: Literary Criticism. Lang's gifts of elegant fluency and fertility came to seem symptomatic of the bookman's fatal dilettantism, while the rigorous aesthetic discipline and high seriousness of James and his followers shaped the protocols of twentieth-century academic criticism. Hubbard quotes James's private putdown of Lang ("beautiful thin facility") and detects his likeness in Jasper Milvain, the glib hack of George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) (James qtd. in Hubbard Volume I xiii).

Wisely refraining from making claims for Lang's intellectual originality or profundity, Hubbard locates his significance in the leading role Lang played in the democratic expansion of literacy and knowledge after the 1870 and 1872 national education acts, which effectively instituted, in Hubbard's phrase, "a people's university" (Volume I xvi). Lang's gift was for popular pedagogy: his essays explained, applied, and broadcast the ideas of other people, and Sigmund Freud extensively cites him in Totem and Taboo (1913). Tylor's Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language...