ABSTRACT
Tackling the Ossianic issue without tracing it back to the discursive terrain of historical controversy, or to the late eighteenth-century poets' instrumental resort to literary forgeries, might prove an impossible task. Yet, it seems now to be high time for a change of attitude towards James Macpherson. While exerting an enormous influence on European and American Romantic literature and stimulating a strongly emotional response, his transgressing and idiosyncratic translations of, originally, Gaelic ballads, have always been greeted with less enthusiasm, when not with open condescension, by critics and academics (with such few notable exceptions as Hugh Blair, Matthew Arnold, J. C. Shairp). The Johnsonian charge - the indignant attack on literary fraud and its corruptive effects on the recovery of a 'true' national past, recorded through an array of written memories - cannot, of course, be dispensed with like a mere thing of the past, but should be counterbalanced by a deeper awareness of the poetical merits of Macpherson's Ossianic production, as opposed to its 'factual' unreliability.
