National Supernaturalism

This chapter examines how the late-Victorian folklorist and critic Andrew Lang reinvented the idea of many-sidedness as a populist polemic—one that showed W. B. Yeats how to recuperate the old moves of literary nationalism for a global modernism. Although Lang had been Arnold’s student at Oxford, his seminal anthropological treatises insisted that many-sidedness could best be cultivated not by sampling “the best which has been thought and said in the world” but rather by omnivorously embracing ancient folk tales alongside pop fiction. Yet Lang’s populism was also predicated upon a crypto-Romantic view of folklore as talismans of an endangered authenticity out of place in the modern world. This buried essentialism ultimately alienated Lang from mainstream anthropology, but it would also teach the young Yeats that presenting the national as the primitive and the primitive as the occult allowed one to frame Irish folk literature as simultaneously local and cosmopolitan.