SOURCE: "Ossian and the Canon in the Scottish Enlightenment," in Ossian Revisited, edited by Howard Gaskill, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, pp. 109-28.

In the following essay, Price studies the factors that propelled the works of Macpherson's Ossian temporarily into the canon of English literature.

The publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763) illustrates a concerted, if an unusual, attempt to expand the literary canon: concerted in that there seems in retrospect to have been a conspiracy among some of the Scottish literati to force the poem into the canon, and unusual in that the works being thus forced were not 'new' at all but had the authority of antiquity. Richard Sher has commented that 'Macpherson, it is true, produced the Ossianic "translations" themselves, but the Edinburgh "cabal" provided the inspiration, incentive, financial support, letters of introduction, editorial assistance, publishing connections, and...