Summary notes from 'Floating in the Breath of the People: Ossianic Mist, Cultural Health, and the Creation'
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Course
Ossian (EN5200)
Institution
University Of St Andrews
This document contains notes of Rhys Kaminski-Jones' 'Floating in the Breath of the People: Ossianic Mist, Cultural Health, and the Creation'. The notes are two pages long and contain comprehensive citation references and page numbers.
Floating in the Breath of the People: Ossianic Mist, Cultural Health, and the Creation
of Celtic Atmosphere, 1760 – 1815
Rhys Kaminski-Jones
Romanticism
27.2
Pp. 135-148
June 2021
(https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0504)
135
- Of Samuel Johnson claiming that the ‘Earse’ language ‘floated in the breath of
the people’: ‘For Johnson, the airborne nature of this language was
straightforwardly a sign of cultural ill-health: these floating words reflected the
drifting vapours of the Ossianic poems themselves, and carried the implication
that Gaelic culture lacked any kind of robust foundation.’
136
- ‘’Celtic atmosphere’ is, however, a topic too widespread and significant for
Romanticists to push to the side-lines, and one too susceptible to
mischaracterisation.’
137
- ‘Celtic air was often defined by an absence of particularized characteristics: it
was an atmosphere emptied of the unhealthy adulterants found elsewhere.’
- ‘… a second strange of writing about Celtic air, rather than stressing its purity,
emphasized instead its permeating with cultural material and meaning.’
138
- ‘…in the foundational texts of vaporous Celticity, mists, fogs, and clouds are
most clearly associated with the discourse of culturally infused air – as
meteorological features that display suspended aerial material to the naked
eye, thus making the invisible visible…’
- ‘Surveys of James Macpherson’s intellectual development have long stressed
his exposure to cutting-edge Homeric scholarship in the colleges of 1750s
Aberdeen.’
- ‘Macpherson also includes ‘whiteness of skin’ and beautiful women under the
supposed physical benefits of this climate…’
139
- ‘Mists in the ‘Fragments’ do not deviate too far from the Ossianic stereotype:
they are suggestive but lightly drawn descriptive effects, associated in
particular with the transient yet lingering lives of dead Caledonians.’
140
- ‘In making this wind the vehicle of a self-consciously Homeric simile,
Macpherson implied that the environmental understanding of Celts matched
that of acknowledged Classical authorities, and invited readers to consider
Ossianic mists as more than just sublime set-dressing.’
143
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