ABSTRACT
Over recent decades, James Macpherson’s avatar of ancient bard Ossian has increasingly been acknowledged as a foundational text of European Romanticism, not only for its elegiac laments and picturesque landscapes but also as generating a wide variety of imagined communities. This essay examines the paradox of defeat on individual and collective level helping to forge national identity, not as fake or deception but as the fabrication of state unification in Germany and Italy or autonomy for previously minority traditions. The legacy of Ossian’s heroic past defines possible future political innovation. The second question addressed will be how to reconcile this with Macpherson’s subsequent career as propagandist, pamphleteer and historian in the service of the expansionist Hanoverian regime, beneficiary of the opportunities offered the Scottish diaspora by service to an imperial future. The final section will examine how both Romanticist and Enlightenment schemes remain embedded, contained a wider temporality, ecological even cosmological in scope, envisaging a point of retrospect on all human endeavour from a planetary future.
