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Ossian scholarship has moved beyond questions of forgery and authenticity to consider the poems' international influence as a founding text of European Romanticism. Building on recent work in translation studies, this essay considers Ossian as the first substantial attempt to translate Gaelic poetry into English, exploring Macpherson's relationship to his Gaelic sources, and his rejection of contemporary 18th century anglophone translation codes. Influenced by the theories of Hugh Blair and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, Macpherson rendered traditional Gaelic heroic ballads in a highly figurative prose poetry, couched in the language of the sublime and the primitive. In conclusion, the essay turns to the posthumously published 'Gaelic' Ossian which turns out to be largely a back-translation of the 1760's 'English' text. Yet Macpherson stimulated interest in Gaelic culture at a time of crisis, and his 'foreignizing' effect created an influential translation paradigm for Gaelic poetry and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sir William Jones. By MICHAEL J. FRANKLIN. (Writers of Wales) Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1995. 137 pp. 4.95 £. Michael J. Franklin is to be congratulated on producing a [...]

Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works. Ed. by MICHAEL J. FRANKLIN. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1995. xxx + 415 pp. 45 £. Michael J. Franklin is to [...]

Sir,--Kathryn Sutherland has written an informative and positive review of my edition of Robert Burns's Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose (January 23). She appreciates the rationale for 'documentary [...]

This essay examines Scott's The Antiquary in relation to the controversy around James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian. Although explicit discussion of Ossian in The Antiquary is mainly confined to Jonathan Oldbuck's comic dialogue with his hot-headed Highland nephew Hector MacIntyre in volume i, chapter 3, the essay argues that the debate was actually central to the larger issue of the ethnic origins and modern identity of the Scots, dramatized in the arguments between the 'Gothic' Oldbuck and the 'Celtic' Sir Arthur Wardour throughout the novel. Oldbuck's planned epic The Caledoniad is discussed in relation to Macpherson's epic Fingal, and I conclude with a suggestion that the often-criticized 'invasion plot' of The Antiquary might have been inspired by that of Fingal, and also Macpherson's earlier poem The Highlander. Scott's irenic vision of Britain in The Antiquary thus resolves ethnic conflict between Goths and Celts in the interest of national unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Ossian validated the Highland landscape for eighteenth-century tourists, the landscape, in turn, seemed to authenticate poems whose authenticity never ceased to be doubted; but text and topography alike ran the risk of dissolving into insubstantiality. Many tourists cited 'local tradition' in order to embroider existing (or to invent new) Fingalian place-names. Ranging over a wide variety of eighteenth-century travel-writers, this article casts new light on the relations between Ossian, travel-writing and Highland topography. It concludes by discussing the 'fieldwork' tradition of Ossianic tourism after 1800, which sought out local tradition bearers, rather than attempting to authenticate Macpherson's 'translations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concentrating on manifestations of the 'equestrian sublime' in the work of Burns and Byron, and especially in 'Tam o'Shanter' and Mazeppa, this essay suggests that while both poets use the 'wild ride' as a metaphor for liberty, their horses acquire a life beyond serving as metaphors for the difficult relationship between reason and passion, culture and nature. Byron's Mazeppa is the more elaborate in refining a moral lesson: Mazeppa learns a middle course between wildness and repression, manifest in the care he lavishes on his well-trained steed. Burns's 'Tam o'Shanter' remains 'whaur extremes meet', its human protagonist a feckless creature compared to his 'noble Maggie', and the poem employs the civilised pleasures of imagination to defy the supernatural interdictions of Calvinism. Nevertheless, the abiding image of both poems is not so much the hard-won wisdom of riderly experience as the frisson of the 'wild ride' itself. It was this that so enthralled the nineteenth-century public and ensured the enduring popularity of these two equestrian poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses Jonathan Livingstone Lowes' contention in 'The Road to Xanadu' that the poem 'Kubla Khan' was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's wide reading in the literature of travel. Other contemporary travelogues that were important to Coleridge's poem; Determination of the geopolitical meaning of the poem; Aspects of the poem's topography.