James Macpherson

Black mark FLEP, else contents appear as new, unread & unblemished in fine wine colored, cloth covered boards. DJ shows no significant surface/edge/wear, as shown

Twayne's English Authors Series … Biography, and discussion of the works, of this controversial poet - perhaps the opposite of a plagiarist, because he claimed that poems he wrote were written by someone else

James Macpherson (b. 1736–d. 1796) was a poet, historian, and controversialist most famous for The Poems of Ossian, his supposed translations from the works of the 3rd-century CE Celtic poet Ossian. While inspired by and incorporating the Gaelic balladry of the Scottish Highlands, Ossian was not as Macpherson claimed, and it is better read as a creative construction of what Macpherson would have liked to think was the heroic poetic tradition emanating from the Highlands of Scotland. It was a reconstruction greeted with recognition within the Irish and Gaelic Scottish world. Macpherson did collaborate with Gaelic poets and incorporated both classical and vernacular Gaelic traditions to differing extents across his oeuvre (there are identifiable sources for passages in Fingal even if none such have been identified for Temora). This makes the notion of fakery or fraud in any straightforward sense untenable. Ossian was highly influential on a global scale. Macpherson's works were also subject to controversy, notably involving Samuel Johnson, though this dispute and the misconceptions on which it was based have played a disproportionately large role within the Anglo-American critical tradition. Until the 1980s, consideration of Macpherson tended to be concerned with questions of influence or questions of authenticity and controversy. Since then, however, scholarship has emphasized other things as well: Macpherson's Scottish Enlightenment context, mid-18th-century ideas of the epic and the place of poetry in culture; the aesthetics and politics of Sentiment; and Ossian's place within debates about British identity in the 18th century within the context of "four nations" or "archipelagic" criticism. With increasingly rare exceptions, considerations of fraud and influence are now read through one of these lenses. …

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