James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.

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English Romanticism and the Celtic World explores the way in which British Romantic writers responded to the national and cultural identities of the 'four nations' England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The essays collected here, by specialists in the field, interrogate the cultural centres as well as the peripheries of Romanticism, and the interactions between these. They underline 'Celticism' as an emergent strand of cultural ethnicity during the eighteenth century, examining the constructions of Celticness and Britishness in the Romantic period, including the ways in which the 'Celtic' countries viewed themselves in the light of Romanticism. Other topics include the development of Welsh antiquarianism, the Ossian controversy, Irish nationalism, Celtic landscapes, Romantic form and Orientalism. The collection covers writing by Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron and Shelley, and will be of interest to scholars of Romanticism and Celtic studies.

Vols. for 1898-1968 include a directory of publishers.

Faking Literature, first published in 2001, examines the role of forgery in literature.

The Celtic Revival began more than a century before Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance. Keats and Romantic Celtism is the first book to consider the pervasive influence of period Celticism upon Keats's work, from the Druidism that underlies his unfinished epics to the Celtic-derived folklore that his poetry draws upon. Christine Gallant shows that more than two hundred and fifty traditional folklore motifs of the faerie fill his major poems, as well as minor epistolary ones that have been critically neglected.