Selected Bibliography:
James Macpherson and Ossian

By Richard B. Sher,
New Jersey Institute of Technology,
With Dafydd Moore

Last revised 13 March 2004

Bibliographies

• George F. Black, Macpherson's Ossian and the Ossianic Controversy (New York, 1926; also published in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library in the same year). Useful for older sources.
• John J. Dunn, "Macpherson's 'Ossian' and the Ossianic Controversy: A Supplementary Bibliography," Bulletin of the New York Public Library 75 (1971): 465-73. Updates Black, but only through the 1960s (for the 1970s and 1980s, see Paul J. deGategno's biography, cited below).
• "James Macpherson 1736-1796," in Margaret M. Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 3: 1700-1800, Part 2 (London: Mansell, and New York: R. R. Bowker, 1989), pp. 179-83. A useful survey of bibliographical issues.

Editions

• The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, with an Introduction by Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996). The new standard edition of the poems, based on the 1765 edition of The Works of Ossian, with critical notes and a helpful introduction. Also includes Macpherson's dissertations and preface to the 1773 edition of the Works, and Hugh Blair's A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian. The paperback format (distributed in North America by Columbia Univ. Press) makes Macpherson's Ossian widely available for the first time.

Biographies

• Paul J. deGategno, James Macpherson. Twayne's English Authors Series No. 467. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989). Very accessible, with a useful annotated bibliography.
• Paul J. deGategno, "The Sublime Savage in America: James 'Ossian' Macpherson's Tour of Duty in West Florida," Scotia: Interdisciplinary Journal of Scottish Studies 16 (1992): 1-20.
• Bailey Saunders, The Life and Letters of James Macpherson (London, 1894; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1968). The standard appreciation of Macpherson, now superseded except perhaps for some of the correspondence it contains.
• John Semple Smart, James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature (London: 1905). The standard exposé, now superseded.
• Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1988). A sophisticated reassessment, opening the door to serious criticism after two hundred years of condescending dismissal.

Criticism

• Collections

  • Jennifer J. Carter and John H. Pittock, eds., Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1987). Contains five articles (of uneven length and quality) on Macpherson and Ossian, by Maurice Colgan, Josef Bysveen, Leah Leneman, George McElroy, and Thomas M. Curley.
  • Howard Gaskill, ed., Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1991). An outgrowth of Gaskill's efforts to reinvigorate Ossianic studies, with articles by Donald E. Meek, Fiona J. Stafford, Uwe Böker, Paul J. DeGategno, John Valdimir Price, Steve Rizza, David Raynor, John Dwyer, and Richard B. Sher.
  • Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill, eds., From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). Developed from a conference held at Somerville College, Oxford, in March 1996, with contributions by Joep Leerssen, Derick S. Thomson, David Hall Radcliffe, Murray G. H. Pittock, Alan G. Macpherson, Mícheál Mac Craith, John MacQueen, Thomas Keymer, F. J. Lamport, Lisa Kozlowski, Susan Manning, Christopher Smith, Dafydd Moore, G. J. Watson, Luke Gibbons, and the editors.
  • Scotlands 4 (1997). Special issue on Ossian.
  
  

• Monographs and Articles

  • Poetry and Controversy

    • Frederic Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984). Despite an unpromising title, contains an unjustly neglected analysis of Macpherson which was in many ways ahead of its time.
    • Josef Bysveen, Epic Tradition and Innovation in James Macpherson's "Fingal" (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982).
    • Robert Folkenflik, "Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery," The Centennial Review 18 (1974): 378-91.
    • Howard Gaskill, "'Ossian' Macpherson: Towards a Rehabilitation," Comparative Criticism 8 (1986): 113-46. An important call to arms for revisionists.
    • Nick Groom, "Celts, Goths and the Nature of the Literary Source," in Tradition in Translation: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. Avaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 275-96. Valuable comparison of Percy's written Gothic past and Macpherson's oral Celtic past.
    • Nick Groom, The Forger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002). Appreciative and deliberately provocative treatment of Macpherson and others.
    • Kristine Louise Haugen, "Ossian and the Invention of Textual History," Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (April 1998): 309-27.
    • Andrew Hook, "'Ossian' Macpherson as Image Maker," The Scottish Review 36 (November 1984): 39-44. A call for recognizing the English agenda within the authenticity issue.
    • Micheál Mac Craith, "Fingal: eípic thosaigh James McPherson," Eighteenth-Century Ireland 12 (1997): 77-86.
    • Dafydd Moore, "Ossian, Chivalry and the Politics of Genre: The Case of Fingal King of Morven, a Knight-Errant," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (Summer 2000): 21-35. Examines an obscure pamphlet of 1764 that reads Macpherson's Ossian as a chivalric romance in the medieval Gaelic tradition.
    • Dafydd Moore, "Heroic Incoherence in James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian," Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (Fall 2000): 43-59. A rich and provocative critique of the view that Ossianic poetry represented a kind of neoclassical compromise between polite sentiment and militant heroism.
    • Peter T. Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain 1760-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), chap. 1. Originally published as "Fool's Gold: The Highland Treasures of Macpherson's Ossian," ELH 53 (1986).
    • Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). Contains an interesting, gendered interpretation of Ossian, parts of which appeared earlier as "Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poems of Ossian," PMLA 107 (1992): 120-30.
    • David Hill Radcliffe, "Ossian and the Genres of Culture," Studies in Romanticism 31 (Summer 1992): 213-32. A genre-criticism approach.
    • M. M. Rubel, Savage and Barbarian: Historical Attitudes in the Criticism of Homer and Ossian in Britain, 1760-1800 (Amsterdam, 1978).
    • Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988), chap. 2. Treats Macpherson's Ossian as an episode in the ongoing Scottish concern with personal and national identity.
    • Margaret M. Smith, "Prepublication Circulation of Literary Texts: The Case of James Macpherson's Ossianic Verses," Yale University Library Gazette 64 (1990): 132-57. How the manuscripts of poems in Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry made the rounds.
    • Derick S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's "Ossian" (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1952). Classic work that established some of the Gaelic ballads used by Macpherson, by a scholar who actually knows the language!
    • Derick Thomson, "Macpherson's Ossian: Ballads to Epics," in The Heroic Process: Form, Function and Fantasy in Folk Epic, ed. Bo Almqvist, Seamus O'Cathan, and Padraig O'Healain (Dublin, 1987), 243-64.
    
    

  • History, Celticism, and Empire

    • Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London: Croom Helm, and Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1978), chap. 2.
    • Leith Davis, "'Origins of the Specious': James Macpherson's Ossian and the Forging of the British Empire," The Eighteenth Century 34 (1993): 132-50.
    • William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1998). Has lots to say about Macpherson and Ossian in the context of Scottish national identity.
    • Luke Gibbons, "The Sympathetic Bond: Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism," in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 273-91. Macpherson and ideologies of assimilation.
    • Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideals of History and Fiction (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1986). Explores the "forgery" issue in historical context.
    • Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), chap. 10. A valuable reassessment of Macpherson's encounter with history, arguing that he was a Whig not a Tory.
    • Gauti Kristmannsson, "Ossian: A Case of Celtic Tribalism or a Translation without an Original?" Transfer (1997): 449-62. An interesting treatment of the Irish-Scottish debate over the origins of Ossian, with some attention to Samuel Johnson as well.
    • Philippe Laplace, "L'institution du corpus imaginaire gaélique dans la littérature écossaise: MacPherson et Scott entre ideologie et synecdoque culturelle," Etudes écossaises 6 (2000): 129-45.
    • Sebastian Mitchell, "James Macpherson's Ossian and the Empire of Sentiment," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1999): 155-71.
    • Clare O'Halloran, "Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past: The Challenge of Macpherson's Ossian," Past & Present, 124 (August 1989): 69-94.
    • Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (London: Routledge, 1997). Contains a finely balanced chapter on Macpherson and the cultural politics of primitivism.
    • Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). Contains a section on "Macpherson's Protesting Lament" in the context of Jacobite political culture in Scotland.
    • Edward D. Snyder, The Celtic Revival in English Literature, 1760-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1923). A seminal study, though now dated.
    • Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). Chap. 5 deals with the Ossianic nemesis William Shaw and his Gaelic dictionary in the context of the "Celtomania" of the 1760s.
    • Fiona Stafford, "Primitivism and the 'Primitive' Poet: A Cultural Context for Macpherson's Ossian," in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 79-87. Informed reading of the issue of Scottish kitsch and Ossian.
    • D. S. Thomson, "Ossian Macpherson and the Gaelic World of the Eighteenth Century," Aberdeen University Review 40 (1963-64): 7-20.
    • Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 15-41. Savage criticism of Ossian and Gaelic culture.
    • Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), part 5. Rich criticism on Ossian and Celticism, without the pugnacious attitude found in some of Weinbrot's other pronouncements on this topic.
    • Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989). Contains a stimulating, if occasionally shaky, discussion of Ossianic aesthetics in terms of Highland assimilation.
    
    

  • Macpherson and Johnson

    • Paul Baines, "'Putting a Book Out of Place': Johnson, Ossian and the Highland Tour," Durham University Journal 84 (1992): 235-48.
    • Thomas M. Curley, "Johnson's Last Word on Ossian: Ghostwriting for William Shaw," in Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (see Collections, above), 375-431. Includes a facsimile of the appendix to the second edition of Shaw's An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Ascribed to Ossian (1782), part of an episode in the Ossian wars that is discussed more fully (and from a very different point of view) in an essay by Richard B. Sher in the Gaskill collection cited above.
    • Kevin Hart, Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). The Ossian controversy is discussed in terms of definitions of cultural property, pp. 136-50.
    • Clare Lamont, "Dr Johnson, the Scottish Highlander, and the Scottish Enlightenment," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12 (Spring 1989): 47-55.
    • Fiona Stafford, "Dr Johnson and the Ruffian: New Evidence in the Dispute between Samuel Johnson and James Macpherson," Notes and Queries, n.s. 36 (1989): 70-77. More revisionist fodder.
    • Kathryn Temple, "Johnson and Macpherson: Cultural Authority and the Construction of Literary Property," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (1993): 355-87.
    • William Ferguson, "Samuel Johnson's Views on Scottish Gaelic Culture," Scottish Historical Review 77 (Oct. 1998): 183-98. Argues forcefully that Johnson was "all at sea" in regard to Ossian and Scottish Gaelic, largely because "he could never be made to understand that in Scotland the term 'Irish' signified Scottish Gaelic, as did the term 'Erse.'"
    
    

  • Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment

    • John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998). Contains much stimulating discussion of the place of Macpherson's Ossian in the sentimental ethos of the Scottish Enlightenment.
    • Ian Haywood, "The Making of History: Historiography and Literary Forgery in the Eighteenth Century," Literature and History 9 (1983): 139-51. Discusses Hugh Blair's preface to the Fragments of Ancient Poetry.
    • Arthur E. McGuinness, "Lord Kames on the Ossian Poems: Anthropology and Criticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10 (1968): 65-75.
    • Duncan Macmillan, Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1986). A marvelous book with a lively chapter on the Runciman brothers' Ossianic painting and its Enlightenment connections.
    • Leah Leneman, "Ossian and the Enlightenment," Scotia 11 (1987): 13-29. Brief but stimulating account, stressing the Scottish Enlightenment-Highlands connection.
    • Dafydd Moore, "James Macpherson and Adam Ferguson: An Enlightenment Encounter," Scottish Literary Journal 24 (November 1997): 5-23.
    • Steven Rizza, "Hugh Blair," in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, 2 vols. (Bristol, 1999), 1:101-7. Emphasizes Blair's literary side, with much attention to Ossian.
    • Robert Morrell Schmitz, Hugh Blair (New York: King's Crown Press, 1948). A half-century old, but still occasionally useful.
    • Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, and Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1985), chap. 6. Argues that Macpherson's Ossian was among other things a product of the Edinburgh Enlightenment.
    • Richard B. Sher, "Those Scotch Imposters and their Cabal: Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment," Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Roger L. Emerson (London, Ont., 1982), 55-63. Another rendition of the Scottish collaboration theory.
    • Fiona Stafford, "Hugh Blair's Ossian, Romanticism and the Teaching of Literature," in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. Robert Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 68-88.
    • Yoshiaki Sudo, "An Unpublished Lecture of Hugh Blair on the Poems of Ossian," The Hiyoshi Review of English Studies, no. 25 (March 1995): 160-94. Dropped from Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), the Ossian lecture is here reconstructed from surviving student notes.
    
    

  • Ossianic Influences

    • Frederic I. Carpenter, "The Vogue of Ossian in America: A Study in Time," American Literature 2 (1931): 405-17. A classic introduction.
    • S. Cristea, "Ossian versus Homer: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy," Italian Studies 24 (1969): 93-111. A subtly argued piece on Cesarotti's use of Ossian to validate non-Homeric/classical poetry (and by extension other things).
    • John Daverio, "Schumann's Ossianic Manner," 19th-Century Music 21 (Spring 1998): 247-72.
    • Roger Fiske, Scotland in Music: A European Enthusiasm (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). A very readable treatment.
    • Howard Gaskill, "Ossian in Europe," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 21 (December 1994): 643-75. Now the best starting point for Ossian's European career.
    • Anna H. Harwell Celenza, "Efterklange af Ossian: The Reception of James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian in Denmark's Literature, Art, and Music," Scandinavian Studies 70 (Fall 1998): 359-96. Revisionist piece which argues that Niels W. Gade's Eferklange af Ossian was responsible for exaggerations about the Danish reception of Ossian.
    • Kristine Louise Haugen, "Ossian and the Invention of Textual History," Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (April 1998): 309-27. Deals with Ossianic influences on the Homeric scholarship of Robert Wood and Friedrich August Wolf, and the defense of Ossian by Johann Matthias Schrockh.
    • Jack McLaughlin, "Jefferson, Poe and Ossian," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (Summer 1993): 627-34.
    • James S. Malek, "Eighteenth-Century British Dramatic Adaptations of Macpherson's 'Ossian,'" Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 14 (1975): 36-41, 52. Thin, but a starting point.
    • Susan Manning, "Ossian, Scott, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literary Nationalism," Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1982): 39-54. Focuses on the connection between myth-making and nationalism.
    • Susan Manning, "Why Does It Matter that Ossian Was Thomas Jefferson's Favourite Poet?" Symbiosis 1 (Oct. 1997): 219-36. The best of several articles dealing with Ossian and Jefferson.
    • Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Treats Ossian's influence on Blake.
    • Henry Okun, "Ossian in Painting," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 327-56.
    • David Punter, "Ossian, Blake, and the Questionable Source," in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, ed. by Valeria Tinkler-Villani et al. (Amsterdam, 1995).
    • Rudolf Tombo, Ossian in Germany (1901; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1966). The old standard on its subject.
    • Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). Contains a splendid discussion of Ossian's influence on the Romantic novel, set within a national and imperial context.
    • Paul Van Tiegham, Ossian en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1917). Still the standard work on its subject.

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