James Macpherson, Fingal and Other Poems

The facts concerning the production and reception of James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian have been established and argued over frequently enough since the 23-year-old Macpherson met the dramatist John Home in the Scottish spa town of Moffat in 1759. The evidence and results of these debates and investigations are to be found in the bibliography to this article. For this reason, and because I want to signal my sense of the importance of actually reading Ossian, this chapter will concentrate on suggesting some ways in which the evolution, form, and feel of the poems can be interpreted in terms of the conditions and motivating forces behind their appearance. Within the constraints of space I also want to indicate in passing how Macpherson could be seen as a vital part of the story of British literature from Milton to Blake, and how writing about Ossian involves thinking about fundamental issues of cultural identity both in a historical and in a theoretical or methodological sense. It goes without saying of course that in the present context such comments will be selective and brief (rightly or wrongly I have little to say, for example, about the sublime), but that I hope they will stand as a representative introduction to the field.