Adam Ferguson, The Poems of Ossian and the imaginative life of the Scottish enlightenment

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11348365
AutoresDafydd Moore (0000-0003-1471-7275, University of Plymouth, autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Volumen31
Número2
Páginas277-288
Fecha de publicación2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory of European Ideas (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0191-6599 • E-ISSN: 1873-541X
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.013
OpenAlexW1999226790
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Language change · Literariness · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity