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James Macpherson’s “Poems of Ossian”, first published from 1760 as Fragments of Ancient Poetry, were the literary sensation of the age. Attacked by Samuel Johnson and others as “forgeries”, nonetheless the poems enthralled readers around the world, attracting rapturous admiration from figures as diverse as Goethe, Diderot, Jefferson, Bonaparte and Mendelssohn. This International Companion examines the social, political and philosophical context of the poems, their disputed origins, their impact on world literature, and the various critical afterlives of Macpherson and of his literary works.

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CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface
A Brief Biography of James Macpherson
Introduction (Dafydd Moore)

• The Correspondence of James Macpherson (Paul deGategno)
• Ossian and the Gaelic World (Lesa Ní Mhunghaile)
• Ossian and the State of Translation in the Scottish Enlightenment (Gauti Kristmannsson)
• Nostalgic Ossian and the Transcreation of the Scottish Nation (Cordula Lemke)
• Landscape and the Sense of Place in The Poems of Ossian (Sebastian Mitchell)
• Ossian’s Impact on the Discovery of Ancient Scandinavian Literature (Robert W. Rix )
• The Significance of James Macpherson’s Ossian for Visual Artists (Murdo Macdonald)
• Macpherson’s Iliad and the Logic of Literary Primitivism(Dafydd Moore)
• Principles, Prejudices, and the Politics of James Macpherson’s Historical Writing (Robert W. Jones)

Endnotes
Further Reading 
Notes on Contributors
Index

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Cover image: The woes of Ossian, 1825, by Kysfaludy Karoli (1788–1830). Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galeria (Fine Arts Museum). Photo: akg-images / De Agostini Picture Lib. / G. Dagli Orti