Orality, Ossian and Translation

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ISSN 1861-583X

ISBN 978-3-631-82115-2 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82582-2 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82583-9 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-82584-6 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b17587

© Peter Lang GmbH

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Berlin 2020

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About the editors

GERALD BÄR is Assistant Professor at the Universidade Aberta of Portugal where he teaches online in the areas of Cutural Studies, German and Comparative Literature. He is Senior Researcher of CECC, co-editor of the Revista de Estudos Alemães in Portugal and has published widely on the motif of the “Doppelgänger” in literature and film and on the reception of Ossian.

HOWARD GASKILL is Honorary Fellow in German at the University of Edinburgh. His major research interests have included Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Scottish-German literary relations (in particular Macpherson’s Ossian), literary translation, and more recently Arthur Koestler. In 2019 his translation into English of Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion appeared with Open Book Publishers, and he is now working on a new translation of Goethe’s Werther.

About the book

The aim of this book is to revisit Ossian, whilst broadening the scope of oral literature and translation to embrace cultural contexts outside of Europe. Epics, ballads, prose tales, ritual and lyric songs, as genres, existed orally before writing was invented. Serious debate about them, at least in modern Western culture, may be said to have begun with James Macpherson and Thomas Percy. Considering the ongoing debate on orality and authenticity in the case of Ossian, this book includes ground-breaking, previously published essays which provide essential information relating to orality, Ossian and translation, but have been frequently overlooked. Its contributions focus on the aspects of authenticity, transmediation, popular poetry and music, examining Scottish, German, Portuguese, Brazilian, African, American Indian, Indian and Chinese literatures.

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Preface

Fiona Stafford

Dr Johnson and the Ruffian: New Evidence in the Dispute between Samuel Johnson and James Macpherson

Howard Gaskill

What Did James Macpherson Really Leave on Display at His Publisher’s Shop in 1762?

Gauti Kristmannsson

James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian: A Translation of “Low” Culture into “High”?

Sebastian Mitchell

Ossian and Orality; or the Sound of Ossian

Gerald Bär

Genre and Gender: Ossianic Poetry from Oral Tradition to National Epic and Lyrical Drama

Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass

“Original Harmony”: Ossianic Voices in Alencar’s Indianist Novels

James Porter

Ossian in the New World: Alexandre Levy’s Symphonic Poem, Comala

Landeg White

Confessions of a Justified Folklorist

Ana Paula da Silva Machado