Andrew Lang

In a remarkable literary career, Andrew Lang challenged the increasing specialism that accompanied the advance of modernity and science in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, authoring an extraordinary body of rigorous, scholarly works in the fields of social anthropology, folklore, Homeric studies, history, and religion, while simultaneously turning out novels, poems for periodicals, and inexhaustible columns of prose journalism to make money. He was widelyregarded as one of the most influential men of letters and reviewers of his day. He was a founding member and later President of the Folklore Society, and, with his wife, helped transform the taste inchildren's literature with their anthologized fairy stories for young people. G. K. Chesterton, paying tribute on Lang's death in 1912 to the scale and diversity of his legacy to the humanities, compared him to a 'kind of Indian god with a hundred hands'. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished correspondence and new sources of information, this first full biography of Lang documents in compelling detail his double existence as a scholar and journalist, the intellectual impactof his cross-disciplinary approach to learning and writing, and the critical controversies he courted as a writer and thinker to advance knowledge in the human sciences. The book also throws new lighton Lang's personal life: on the uncomfortable legacy of his grandfather, whose notorious part in the Sutherland Clearances earlier in the century left its mark on the family; on the enduring influence on him of his early Scottish education and its generalist traditions of learning; and on his friendships with fellow writers, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Rider Haggard, Edmund Gosse, Rhoda Broughton, and William Henley. The result is a fascinating portrait of a man who livedone of the most productive lives in literature, sought to make knowledge available to everyone, and bridged, as no other, the university and the literary world, the proverbial 'Grub Street and the ivorytower'.

A good biography helps shed light on the lives of a particular individual, but a great biography also sheds light on the time period and culture that the individual lived in. Sloan's Andrew Lang is a great biography. Choice

John Sloan was born in Scotland. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford and was C.U.F. Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Harris Manchester, Oxford, where he is now an Emeritus Fellow.

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