In Nazi Germany between the years 1940 and 1944, proof of your Aryan or Semitic roots meant the difference between life and death. How this inhuman and intrinsically absurd theory of racial superiority originated and how it took hold of the German imagination makes for a fascinating, scholarly study. Tracing the origins of the Aryan Myth in the West, the author shows how in the heyday of nationalism, most European people developed legends glorifying their high born ancestry. He shows how these legends developed into pseudoscientific theories, which treated Europeans as the norm and other peoples as inferior--until in 19th-century Germany they culminated in the concept of a superior Germanic "race" in contrast to the inferior Jewish "race." This cultural study sheds horrifying new light on the philosophy that "justified" the mass extermination of millions of "subhumans" during World War II.--From publisher description.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1870.

In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how modern national consciousness comes into being through fictional narratives. Literature is of particular importance to this process, for it is responsible for tracing the nations evolution through glorious tales of its history. In nineteenth-century Britain, the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played an important role in construction of contemporary national identity. These two legends provide excellent windows through which to view British culture, because they provide very different perspectives. King Arthur and Robin Hood have traditionally been diametrically opposed in terms of their ideological orientation. The former is a king, a man at the pinnacle of the social and political hierarchy, whereas the latter is an outlaw, and is therefore completely outside conventional hierarchical structures. The fact that two such different figures could simultaneously function as British national heroes suggests that nineteenth-century British nationalism did not represent a single set of values and ideas, but rather that it was forced to assimilate a variety of competing points of view.

Critically examining the discourse of Indo-European scholarship over the past two hundred years, Aryan Idols demonstrates how the interconnected concepts of “Indo-European” and “Aryan” as ethnic categories have been shaped by, and used for, various ideologies. Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics. A wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual history of the past two centuries, Aryan Idols links the pervasive idea of the Indo-European people to major scientific, philosophical, and political developments of the times, while raising important questions about the nature of scholarship as well.

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).