"Many more remains of ancient genius" : Approaches to authorship in the controversies about Ossian and the Czech manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora
Abstract
Since 1760, European literature has been haunted by a fervent dispute about the poems of Ossian and their editor / translator / author James MacPherson. Two hundred and fifty years of critical debates suggest that Ossian cannot be dismissed as a mere forgery: it allows us to observe and analyze a process of vastly influential "intercultural translation".
The development of Ossian criticism - from MacPherson's contemporaries to nineteenth-century readers, Derick Thomson's groundbreaking study The Gaelic Sources of MacPherson's Ossian from 1952 and contemporary perspectives - reflects the changes in the approach to authorship. To follow Michel Foucault's terminology, Macpherson may be, with certain reservations, considered one of the "initiators of discursive practices", as he "put into circulation a certain number of resemblances and analogies".
The vast cultural impact of the poems of Ossian can be traced across Europe. In the Czech Lands, the Ossian affair inspired a charged controversy concerning allegedly ancient literary monuments, the so-called Manuscript of Dvůr Králové and Manuscript of Zelená Hora.
The argument about their authorship was of immense social and political importance during the Czech national revival. The paper will compare the construction of authorship in the case of Ossian and of the Czech manuscripts and their employment in the construction of cultural identity.
It will also comment on the questions of authenticity and originality in relation to Ossian and the Manuscripts: although Foucault and other thinkers tend to dismiss the importance of these values in the assessment of literary texts, their role in the construction of cultural identities in the nineteenth century and even later cannot be overlooked.