Tree of Tales

Tree of Tales
Author: Trevor A. Hart
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1932792643

"This work examines the theological relationship between creation and creativity in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It does so by bringing together a synthesis of various disciplines and perspectives to the creativity of J.R.R. Tolkien. Hart and Khovacs provide a fresh reading of these important themes in Tolkien, and the result captures the multi-faceted nature of Tolkien's own vivid theology and literary imagination." --Amazon.com.

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang
Author: John Sloan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-05-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0192692364

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 widely regarded 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 in children'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 Drawing on a wealth of unpublished correspondence and new sources of information, this first full biography of Lang documents in compelling detail his double existence as a scholar and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 impact of 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 light on 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 lived one 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 ivory tower'.

Evolution and Society

Evolution and Society
Author: J. W. Burrow
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1966
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521043939

An investigation of the reasons why Victorian pioneers of social science were habitually approaching the study of other societies with largely positivistic and evolutionary methodologies.

The Literary 1880s

The Literary 1880s
Author: Penny Fielding
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107181909

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

The New Prometheans

The New Prometheans
Author: Courtenay Raia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2019-12-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022663549X

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.

History of British Folklore

History of British Folklore
Author: Richard Mercer Dorson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 558
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780415204767

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume 1

Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, Volume 1
Author: Lang Andrew Lang
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2015-05-22
Genre: Folklore
ISBN: 1474404499

The Selected Works of Andrew Lang: Volume 1Anthropology: Fairy Tale, Folklore, the Origins of Religion, Psychical ResearchEdited by Andrew Teverson, Alexandra Warwick and Leigh WilsonThis is the first critical edition of the works of Andrew Lang (1844-1912), the Scottish writer whose enormous output spanned the whole range of late-nineteenth century intellectual culture. Neglected since his death, partly because of the diversity of his interests and the volume of his writing, his cultural centrality and the interdisciplinary nature of his work make him a vital figure for contemporary scholars.This volume covers Lang's wide and influential engagement with the central areas of late nineteenth-century anthropology. Lang made decisive interventions in debates around the meaning of folk tales and the origins of religion, as well as being an important figure in the investigation of spiritualist claims through psychical research. The work reproduced here includes journalism, essays, extracts from books and previously unpublished letters which together articulate and challenge some of the central ideas and discussions of the period, including evolution, the relation between modern and non-modern cultures, the nature of scientific claims to truth, and the consequences of materialism. The volume will provide new and illuminating ways of understanding and assessing the period for scholars across a range of disciplines, including those interested in the histories of the fairy story, of science, of the occult, of colonialism and of anthropology.Key Features: Unpublished archival materialCritical introductions to the major areas of his workFull explanatory notesAndrew Teverson is Professor of English Literature and Associate Dean for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His research centres on the use and meaning of fairy tales, and he has published both on the employment of them in contemporary writing and on the historical development of the form. He is the author of Fairy Tale (Routledge, 2013).Alexandra Warwick is Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research is on Victorian culture, in particular the fin de sicle. Leigh Wilson is Reader in Modern Literature in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on modernism, on the place of supernatural and occult beliefs and practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the contemporary British novel. She is the author of Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (EUP, 2013).