Ossian and the twilight of the epic

Author(s)

Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2015-09-24

Examining board members

Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos; Ofir Bergemann de Aguiar; Mariana Teixeira Marques; Eduardo Vieira Martins; Marta Ribeiro Rocha e Silva de Senna

• Advisor: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos

Abstract

This dissertation is invested in correlating the antithetical synthesis brought about by Ossians longest narratives, Fingal and Temora, to the rise of the eighteenth-century novel. As Hugh Blair inadvertently showed in his Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, James Macphersons most ambitious translations conflate opposing primitivistic and neoclassical discourses, thereby emerging as unredeemably fractured and unstable epics, if one reads them in compliance with their ostensive generic label. Instead, I argue that the contradictory form of Fingal and Temora re-enacts that of eighteenthcentury novelistic narratives, which problematize the distance between narrator and narrated. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 10/18863-7 - The downfall of the epic: Fingal and Temora
• Grantee: Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate