A Networks-Science Investigation into the Epic Poems of Ossian

In 1760 James Macpherson published the first volume of a series of epic poems which he claimed to have translated into English from ancient Scottish-Gaelic sources. The poems, which purported to have been composed by a third-century bard named Ossian, quickly achieved wide international acclaim. They invited comparisons with major works of the epic tradition, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and effected a profound influence on the emergent Romantic period in literature and the arts. However, the work also provoked one of the most famous literary controversies of all time, colouring the reception of the poetry to this day. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scholars, while others protested that they misappropriated material from Irish mythological sources. Recent years have seen a growing critical interest in Ossian, initiated by revisionist and counter-revisionist scholarship and by the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first collected edition of the poems in 1765. Here we investigate Ossian from a networks-science point of view. We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources. Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant network-structural differences between Macpherson's text and those of Homer. They also show a strong similarity between Ossianic networks and those of the narratives known as Acallam na Sen\'orach (Colloquy of the Ancients) from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.Comment: Accepted for publication in Advances in Complex system

"The greatest Poet that has [n]ever existed" -- A Narrative Networks Analysis of the Poems of Ossian

Surprising as it may seem, applications of statistical methods to physics were inspired by the social sciences, which in turn are linked to the humanities. So perhaps it is not as unlikely as it might first appear for a group of statistical physicists and humanists to come together to investigate one of the subjects of Thomas Jefferson's poetic interests from a scientific point of view. And that is the nature of this article: a collaborative interdisciplinary analysis of the works of a figure Jefferson described as a ''rude bard of the North'' and ''the greatest Poet that has ever existed.'' In 2012, a subset of this team embraced an increase in interdisciplinary methods to apply the new science of complex networks to longstanding questions in comparative mythology. Investigations of network structures embedded in epic narratives allowed universal properties to be identified and ancient texts to be compared to each other. The approach inspired new challenges in mathematics, physics and even processes in industry, thereby illustrating how collaborations of this nature can be mutually beneficial and can capture the attention of a public, often ill-served by academic communication and dissemination. This article derives from these works, and from our consistent objective to help bridge the perceived gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. First we discuss the history of relationships between the two. Then we discuss the origins of the poems of Ossian and Jefferson's interests. We follow with our statistical approach in the next section. In the final section, we explore ideas for future research on these themes and discuss the potential of collaborative pursuits of human curiosity to overcome the two cultures dichotomy and embrace a scientific- and humanities-literate information age.Comment: Contriution to book chapte

"The Hero as Man of Letters": Intellectual Politics and the Construction of the Romantic Epic

Although the thirty years from 1794 to 1824 saw the production of more epic poetry than any other period in British literary history, the epic's function within the culture of Romanticism remains largely misunderstood and neglected. The problem in theorizing the Romantic epic stems from the uncommon diversity of epic performances during this period and from the epic's sudden reappearance after a long period of apparent dormancy in the eighteenth century. When the Romantic epic is defined, however, not as poetic form but as a repeated political act, the epic's eighteenth-century history now appears as a continuous process of generic transformation and its formal diversity no longer threatens its generic categorization. In place of understanding the epic as literary genre, I define the Romantic epic as a recurring and highly stylized rhetorical intervention by the intellectual community beginning in the mid-eighteenth century with the primary function of expanding the power of the intellectual "class." Investigating the epic's eighteenth-century transformation, I examine the relationship between classical epics and William Collins and Thomas Gray's Pindaric odes, James Macpherson's Ossian "translations," and James Beattie's Minstrel. I argue that these so-called pre-Romantic poems reveal both a Romantic rejection of the Augustan epic and a Romantic desire to repurpose the epic's structures toward the emerging interests of the intellectual community. The conscious task was to develop a new epic mode, one that would make a hero of the man of letters, to write the kind of epic performance found in Robert Southey's Joan of Arc. Focusing on the Romantic epic's function, I demonstrate that the Romantic epic provided a pattern through which intellectuals began to see themselves and the world. In order to change society Romantic intellectuals were modifying the genre which, in turn, was reshaping intellectual consciousness. Thus, acting reciprocally, I show that the epic was at the center of the larger Romantic project: an intellectual effort to deliver humanity from commercial society

The Scottish Enlightenment and the matter of Troy

The modern world knows the Scottish Enlightenment as the nursery of today’s social sciences, when the outlines of economics, sociology and anthropology first became apparent in the works of Adam Smith and his contemporaries. However, deeper immersion in 18th-century Scottish culture reveals the enduring importance of classical antiquity to intellectuals who were as much late humanists as pioneer social scientists. Indeed, the unexpected fascination of enlightened Scots with the Trojan War and the ancient post-savage society described by Homer opens up new perspectives on Scottish Enlightenment sociology as an offshoot of classical erudition. Moreover, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the institutional embodiment of the Scottish Enlightenment, played a dominant part in the late-18th- and early-19th-century debate about the location of Troy.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Structure of social relations in the novel \emph{The Master and Margarita} by M. A. Bulgakov: A network analysis of verbal communications

A network analysis of the structure of social relationships in one of the most popular Russian novels of the Soviet era The Master and Margarita by M. Bulgakov has been carried out. The structure of the novel is complex (`a story within a story'); the real-world- and the other-world-characters are interacting. A complex and unusual structure of the character network is expected. Presumably, the network may be split in two subgraphs owing very different properties. This complex and unusual composition makes the novel especially attractive for a network analysis. In our study, only paired verbal communications between explicitly present and acting characters have been taken into account. Based on a character pair verbal communication matrix, a graph has been constructed, the vertices of which are the characters of the novel, while the edges correspond to the connections between them. Taking only dialog into account leads to the result, that the character network can be described by an ordinary, rather than a directed graph. Since the activity of the dialogs was out of our scope, the edges have been given no weights. The largest connected component of the graph consists of 76 characters. Centralities were computed to characterize the network. The assortativity coefficient of the network under consideration is negative -0.133, i.e., the network does not demonstrate the properties of a social network. The structure of the communities in the network was also analysed. In addition to the obvious large communities - the characters from the Yershalaim part of the novel and the characters of the Moscow part - the analysis also revealed a fine structure in the Moscow component. Using the analysis of centralities, a group of main characters has been detected. The central characters of the novel are Bezdomny, Woland, Levi Matthew, Koroviev, Azazello, Behemoth, Bosoi, Warenukha, Master, and Margarita.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, 39 reference

Sounding Imperial

Spoken words come alive in written verse.In Sounding Imperial, James Mulholland offers a new assessment of the origins, evolution, and importance of poetic voice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining a series of literary experiments in which authors imitated oral voices and impersonated foreign speakers, Mulholland uncovers an innovative global aesthetics of poetic voice that arose as authors invented new ways of crafting textual voices and appealing to readers. As poets drew on cultural forms from around Great Britain and across the globe, impersonating “primitive” speakers and reviving ancient oral performances (or fictionalizing them in verse), they invigorated English poetry.Mulholland situates these experiments with oral voices and foreign speakers within the wider context of British nationalism at home and colonial expansion overseas. Sounding Imperial traces this global aesthetic by reading texts from canonical authors like Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, and Felicia Hemans together with lesser-known writers, like Welsh antiquarians, Anglo-Indian poets of colonialism, and impersonators of Pacific islanders. The frenetic borrowing, movement, and adaptation of verse of this time offers a powerful analytic by which scholars can understand anew poetry’s role in the formation of national culture and the exercise of colonial power. Sounding Imperial offers a more nuanced sense of poetry’s unseen role in larger historical processes, emphasizing not just appropriation or collusion but the murky middle range in which most British authors operated during their colonial encounters and the voices that they used to make those cross-cultural encounters seem vivid and alive

Faking, forging, counterfeiting: discredited practices at the margins of mimesis

Forgeries are an omnipresent part of our culture and closely related to traditional ideas of authenticity, legality, authorship, creativity, and innovation. Based on the concept of mimesis, this volume illustrates how forgeries must be understood as autonomous aesthetic practices - creative acts in themselves - rather than as mere rip-offs of an original work of art. The proceedings bring together research from different scholarly fields. They focus on various mimetic practices such as pseudo-translations, imposters, identity theft, and hoaxes in different artistic and historic contexts. By opening up the scope of the aesthetic implications of fakes, this anthology aims to consolidate forging as an autonomous method of creation

Social reality and mythic worlds : reflections on folk belief and the supernatural in James Macpherson’s Ossian and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala

This thesis investigates the representation of social reality that can be reflected by folk belief and the supernatural within mythic worlds created in epic poetry. Although the society, itself, can be regarded as the creator of its own myth, it may still be subjected to the impact of the synthesized mythic world, and this study seeks to address the roles of the society in the shaping of such mythic worlds. The research is inspired by an innovative approach, using James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760-63) and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835-49) as epic models that benefit from mythical traditions. Through the examination and the comparison of these two epic collections, both of which seem to have a close association with social reformation and restructuring, the study explores the universality of human nature. It also reveals the extent mythic worlds may exhibit the ‘realities’ of their source-societies and how mythical tradition may become a reflection of a society’s transforming past modes of thinking. Moreover, the study devotes special attention to the influence of mythic heritage on national awakening and the construction of national identities. The research treats Macpherson as the re-inventor of Gaelic oral tradition with his Ossian, where he portrays a Romanticized image of a gallant past according to the norms of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the mythic world of the epic can be seen as a combination of an ancient heroic past and the aesthetic refinement of a polished age. In this framework, as the product of a society going through a transition period from traditional to modern, Ossian seems to reflect the society’s changing world-view, both celebrating, and mourning for a culture on the verge of extinction. Focusing on the Kalevala, the study analyzes its portrayal of Finnish folk belief. The Kalevala, like Ossian, is an attempt to recover ancient tradition, which seems to revolve around supernatural and divine elements, with hopes to establish a common social reality. It is an expression of Finnish language, belief and culture, whose production was prompted by the looming Finnish nationalism. Therefore, the evolving mode of thought represented in the mythic world of Kalevalaic poems, is expected and favoured by the society, enabling the epic to encourage a social reformation

Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting

Forgeries are an omnipresent part of our culture and closely related to traditional ideas of authenticity, legality, authorship, creativity, and innovation. Based on the concept of mimesis, this volume illustrates how forgeries must be understood as autonomous aesthetic practices – creative acts in themselves – rather than as mere rip-offs of an original work of art. The proceedings bring together research from different scholarly fields. They focus on various mimetic practices such as pseudo-translations, imposters, identity theft, and hoaxes in different artistic and historic contexts. By opening up the scope of the aesthetic implications of fakes, this anthology aims to consolidate forging as an autonomous method of creation