Citation, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Works of Andrew and Nora Lang

This dissertation argues that the representations and practices of authorship in the works of Andrew Lang (1844-1912) and Nora Lang (1851-1933) emblematize this literary couple’s struggles to define the nature of literary creativity and, by extension, to determine whose creative efforts are worthy of acknowledgment. Chapter One reveals the importance of adaptation to Andrew’s definition of creativity by considering the relationship between his first book, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: With Other Poems (1872), and three texts that shaped his conception of authorship: Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03), E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Chapter Two focuses on the three-year period (1887-90) during which Andrew, now a well-established man of letters, deployed his own authority to defend his friend H. Rider Haggard against charges of plagiarism. I focus on three of his creative works that claim adaptation is a necessary precondition of origi-nality: He (1887), a parody of Haggard’s She (1887); “From Mr. Allan Quatermain to Sir Henry Curtis” (1890), an epistolary yarn wherein Haggard’s hero rescues the Stranger from Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (1883); and The World’s Desire (1890), Lang and Haggard’s co-authored sequel to the Odyssey. In Chapter Three, I illustrate the ways in which this same insistence on the communalization of literary materials, and folk- literature in particular, paradoxically obscures Nora’s responsibility for the popular Fairy Book series (1889-1913). Nora’s work is, I demonstrate, consistently represented as domestic labour rather than authorship by Andrew’s prefaces, advertisements for the series, and contemporary reviews. Chapter Four examines her resistance to this misrepresentation. I focus on The Strange Story Book (1913), arguing that the volume’s seemingly eclectic contents — a short biography of the recently-deceased Andrew, appropriated Tlingit legends, and stories of gender- nonconforming and adventurous women — indicate both Nora’s participation in and challenging of the model of author-ship promoted by her husband. Both Langs’ works, I conclude, have much to tell us about the literary, political, and ethical valences of citation.Ph.D.2020-11-16 00:00:0