James Macpherson's "Ossian": Genesis and response.
Item
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Title
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James Macpherson's "Ossian": Genesis and response.
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Identifier
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AAI9000704
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identifier
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9000704
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Creator
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Kahn, Lora.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert A. Day
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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This study takes a reader-response approach to James Macpherson's Ossianic "translations" of the 1760s. One aim of the study is to treat Macpherson's work as an "ideal case" in which to understand how a text acquires meaning in the collaborative interaction between work and interpreter because modern readers find so little to appreciate in this poetry, while it was so popular and influential in its own period. Therefore, some explanation for this popularity must be sought in the special circumstances existing in the middle years of the eighteenth century when Ossian was written.;Utilizing the reception theories of Hans Robert Jauss who is concerned with the larger societal forces which contribute to the creation of a text, and how a text may perform a socially formative function, the study examines the special circumstances of the Ossianic "horizon of expectations." Aspects of the "horizon" which contributed to Ossianic genesis are sentimentalism, recent political developments in Scotland, and the primitivistic and "conjectural" historical theories of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. In the realm of reader response, Wolfgang Iser's ideas of how the individual reader participates in meaning creation are employed to explain how individual, yet representative, readers with benevolistic, sentimental, primitivistic, antiquarian, political, propagandistic as well as literary interests and biases made meaning from the Ossianic text.;Since Ossian was at the forefront of the new reactive literature which helped to break down traditional generic distinctions, a further aim of the study is to identify the true genre of Macpherson's poetry, along with those particular elements which were associated with the sublime. Associated with the concept of sublimity, which took on increasingly psychological overtones as the eighteenth century progressed, is Macpherson's obsession with a bardic persona. This obsession is related to modern psychoanalytic theories of the psychogenesis of imposture.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
