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This study examines the relationship between Enlightenment and romance through the work of James Macpherson and in particular his The Poems of Ossian. By re-reading Macpherson's work in ways not restricted by the sterile and by now largely settled debates over authenticity, Moore establishes Ossian's credentials to be considered as romance, in its manner of construction, its represented sensibility, and in its engagement with the potentialities and limitations of eighteenth-century discourses of sympathy and society. An increasing amount has been written on Macpherson over the last ten or so years, and at last it seems possible to talk about The Poems of Ossian without reference to questions of authenticity or charges of forgery. Yet the polarised debate over the authenticity of the Poems has been superseded by equally polarised arguments about such matters as the cultural significance and politics of Ossian, arguments in which the poems have been used as a convenient peg on which to hang various, often predetermined, positions. Fresh and groundbreaking, this study recentres Ossian revisionism by providing an account of a series of works increasingly talked about, but still little read or understood.
The appearance of James Macpherson's Ossian in the 1760s caused an international sensation. The discovery of poetic fragments that seemed to have survived in the Highlands of Scotland for some 1500 years gripped the imagination of the reading public, who seized eagerly on the newly available texts for glimpses of a lost primitive world. That Macpherson's versions of the ancient heroic verse were more creative adaptations of the oral tradition than literal translations of a clearly identifiable original may have exercised contemporary antiquarians and contributed eventually to a decline in the popularity of Ossian. Yet for most early readers, as for generations of enthusiastic followers, what mattered was not the accuracy of the translation, but the excitement of encountering the primitive, and the mood engendered by the process of reading. The essays in this collection represent an attempt by late twentieth-century readers to chart the cultural currents that flowed into Macpherson's texts, and to examine their peculiar energy. Scholars distinguished in the fields of Gaelic, German, Irish, Scottish, French, English and American literature, language, history and cultural studies have each contributed to the exploration of Macpherson's achievement, with the aim of situating his notoriously elusive texts in a web of diverse contexts. Important new research into the traditional Gaelic sources is placed side by side with discussions of the more immediate political impetus of his poetry, while studies of the reception of Ossian in Scotland, Germany, France and England are part of the larger recognition of the cultural significance of Macpherson's work, and its importance to issues of fragmentation, liminality, colonialism, national identity, sensibility and gender.
This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.
The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre of the ballad into their work. Ballads were central to the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of culture and nationality, to Shakespeare's canonization in the eighteenth century, and to the New Criticism's most influential work, Understanding Poetry. Just how and why did the ballad appeal to so many authors from the Restoration period to the end of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century? Exploring the widespread breach of the wall that separated "high" and "low," Steve Newman challenges our current understanding of lyric poetry. He shows how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform literature from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that became known as the English literary canon. For Newman, the ballad's early lack of prestige actually increased its value for elite authors after 1660. Easily circulated and understood, ballads moved literature away from the exclusive domain of the courtly, while keeping it rooted in English history and culture. Indeed, elite authors felt freer to rewrite and reshape the common speech of the ballad. Newman also shows how the ballad allowed authors to access the "common" speech of the public sphere, while avoiding what they perceived as the unpalatable qualities of that same public's increasingly avaricious commercial society.
This guide combines detailed literary history with discussion of contemporary debates about Scottishness.The book considers the rise of Scottish Studies, the development of a national literature, and issues of cultural nationalism. Beginning in the medieval period during a time of nation building, the book goes on to focus on the 'Scots revival' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before moving on to discuss the literary renaissance of the twentieth century. Debates concerning Celticism and Gaelic take place alongside discussion of key Scottish writers such as William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Oliphant, Hugh MacDiarmid, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway and Liz Lochhead. The book also considers emigre writers to Scotland; Scottish literature in relation to England, the United States and Ireland; and postcolonialism and other theories that shed fresh light on the current status and future of Scottish literature.
Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.
For several decades, interest in the British Romantics’ theorizations and representations of the world beyond their national borders has been guided by postcolonial and, more recently, transatlantic paradigms. GlobalRomanticism: Origins, Orientations, andEngagements, 1760–1820 charts a new intellectual course by exploring the literature and culture of the Romantic era through the lens of long-durational globalization. In a series of wide-ranging but complementary chapters, this provocative collection of essays by established scholars makes the case that many British Romantics were committed to conceptualizing their world as an increasingly interconnected whole. In doing so, moreover, they were both responding to and shaping early modern versions of the transnational economic, political, sociocultural, and ecological forces known today as globalization.
A collection problematizing American and British intellectual transactions