Poetry: James Macpherson’s History Writing in The Highlander and Ossian

Abstract

Chapter 2 begins our detailed analysis of Macpherson’s writings with his early poetry: The Highlander (1758); and the Ossianic Collections (1760-1763). The first half of the chapter examines The Highlander, Macpherson’s neoclassical epic poem about the tenth-century Viking invasion of Scotland. This section demonstrates how Macpherson used historical sources to versify the past, translating the fourteenth- and sixteenth-century history writing of John Fordun and George Buchanan into neoclassical verse. The Highlander also explores Macpherson’s engagement with the British imperial state, which prepares us for our analysis of Macpherson and empire in the rest of the book. This chapter explores Macpherson’s ‘Whig constitutionalism’ and places this in the context of Macpherson’s imperialism. The chapter then examines the paratextual material to the Ossianic Collections. In sections on the Fragments (1760, Fingal (1761/62), and Temora (1763), we analyse the advertisements, prefaces and dissertations that accompany these works, with a particular focus on Macpherson’s methodology and historiographical practice, where Macpherson demonstrates his engagement with the latest Enlightenment thinking.