Ossian and Irish literature

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 studies the impact and influence of James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760–63) on Irish literature. As opposed to a highly enthusiastic response across much of Europe, Irish scholarly and literary reactions to Macpherson’s work were often hostile. By examining key sections of Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938, French translation in 1947), this chapter shows how a range of Irish writers have responded to Macpherson’s work and how responses to Ossian in Irish writing have shifted over time, partly due to changing political and cultural contexts. This chapter also charts the development of Celticism from Romanticism to Modernism and discusses how Ossian is connected to questions of national identity during the Romantic period and is associated with literary recycling and schizoid voices during the Modernist era.