Andrew Lang: A World We Have Lost

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\u27s literature; includes an assessment of a new 2-volume selection of Lang\u27s writing; and concludes that Lang\u27s virtuosic range and slashing keenness of intellect contributed significantly to the rediscovery of the \u27primitive\u27 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