Past event
The Andrew Lang Memorial Lecture
Professor Andrew Teverson, of the University of the Arts in London, will give this year's lecture on Andrew Lang's Fairy Tales.
The event will be introduced by Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Sally Mapstone.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session, chaired by Dr Sara Lodge of the School of English.
About the speaker
Andrew Teverson is Professor of Cultural History and Critical Thinking at the University of the Arts, London.
His recent publications include the edited collection The Fairy Tale World (Routledge Worlds Series, 2019), and a two-volume critical edition of the scholarly writings of Andrew Lang (Edinburgh University Press 2015, with Alexandra Warwick and Leigh Wilson).
Currently he is completing a critical edition of the children's fictions of Andrew Lang, due for publication with Edinburgh University Press in April, and is editor of the sixth volume of Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Fairy Tale (The Modern Age).
Andrew is a member of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and is on the advisory board for the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.
Andrew Lang's Fairy Tales
At the time of his death, on 20 July 1912, Andrew Lang was one of the most famous writers and collectors of fairy tales in Europe. This reputation resulted from a sustained engagement with the genre throughout his writing career, which included editing the phenomenally successful Coloured Fairy Books, writing five fairy-tale themed children's fictions, and producing an extensive body of journalism and scholarship on the subject of folklore.
In this lecture, Andrew Teverson reviews Lang's wide-ranging and influential engagement with folk and fairy tales in order to assess the impact of his work upon fantasy writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Lang is typically seen as the last of a generation of Victorian fairy tale writers, but here Teverson will propose that he also influenced modernist approaches to the genre, and as such, played a critical role in the fashioning of contemporary ideas about storytelling and its role in art and culture.
The Andrew Lang Lecture
The University of St Andrews hosts a lecture series in honour of Andrew Lang (1844 to 1912), an anthropologist, folklorist, classicist, poet, historian, and famed compiler of folktales.
This series was founded in 1926 from a bequest by Sir Peter Redford Scott Lang, who was Regius Professor of Mathematics in the United College between 1879 and 1921. The lecturer is required to give a lecture on Andrew Lang and his work, or one of the subjects that Lang wrote about.
Previous lecturers have included John Buchan and J.R.R. Tolkien, who gave the most famous lecture to date, 'Fairy Stories' in 1939.