• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Association for Scottish Literature

Scottish Literature's International Voice

  • Home
  • News
  • About
    • ASL Council Members
    • Honorary Fellowships
  • Publications
    • Author submissions
    • Books
      • Annual Volumes
      • Free Publications
      • International Companions to Scottish Literature
      • New Writing Scotland
      • Occasional Papers
      • Scotnotes Study Guides
      • Other titles
    • Periodicals
      • Scottish Literary Review
      • Scottish Language
      • The Bottle Imp
    • Articles
    • Audio
  • Events
    • ASL Book Launches
    • ASL Conferences
    • ASL Lectures
  • Schools
    • Videos
      • Schools Conference: 2021
      • Schools Conference: 2020
      • Schools Conference: 2019
      • Schools Conference: 2018
      • Schools Conference: 2017
      • Schools Conference: 2016
      • Schools Conference: 2015
      • Schools Conference: 2014
      • Schools Conference: 2013
      • Strange Tales: Three Uncanny Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
      • Tally’s Blood
    • Free Publications
    • Schools Conference
    • Scotnotes Study Guides
    • Teaching Notes
    • Teaching Units
    • Voices of Scotland
  • Contact
    • Author Submissions
  • Join the ASL
Home / Publications / Books / International Companions to Scottish Literature / International Companion to James MacPherson and the Poems of Ossian

International Companion to James MacPherson and the Poems of Ossian

The International Companion to
JAMES MACPHERSON AND THE POEMS OF OSSIAN

Edited by Dafydd Moore

Published in: Paperback, 198 pages. 
By: Scottish Literature International,
February 2017 
Price: £19.95 | €22.95 | USA $24.95 
ISBN 9781908980199

Buy from our bookshop
Buy from bookshop.org (USA)
Buy from betterworldbooks.com (Worldwide)
Download from Project Muse

This book is available internationally and can be ordered from any bookseller


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.

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 

    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

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

Footer

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Archives

ASL
Department of Scottish Literature
University of Glasgow
7 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QH
Scotland
Phone/Fax: +44 (0) 141 330 5309

© 2022 Association of Scottish Literature · Developed by TRWA ·