What is A Network? (And Who is Andrew Lang?)

This essay traces the strikingly prolific career of Andrew Lang and places thatcareer in the context of the shifting late-Victorian literary field, which Lang servedimportantly to shape. The essay introduces Lang’s milieu and re-orients readers to aliterary personality who, while known, is only rarely studied in his own right—a detail ofreception history the essay explains with recourse to the relational sociology of PierreBourdieu and Bruno Latour. Restoring Lang’s “network effect” through historical analysishelps raise a number of conceptual questions, each of which is pursued in the essays of thisspecial issue: such questions include the nature of textual interpretation, the changingoutlines of disciplines, the philosophy of historical method, and conceptions of authorshipand collaboration in the modern cultural marketplace. Placing Lang back in his proper spotat the center of the late-Victorian networks he helped convene (1) helps historicize ourunderstanding of the modern “field of cultural production” (Bourdieu’s term) in an expanded,protodisciplinary sense and (2) discloses new genealogies of literary and theoreticalhistory. These new genealogies in turn cast altered light on the methodologicalpresuppositions we draw upon to evaluate Lang and his network here. “Theoreticalhistoricism” is the term used to describe approaches that trace such feedback loops betweenthe historical object analyzed and the modern method used to analyze them