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Ossian by Werther; or, the ‘respect for this author’
Author(s) -
Bär Gerald
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12394
Subject(s) - character (mathematics) , german , audience measurement , literature , history , art , psychology , psychoanalysis , philosophy , linguistics , law , political science , geometry , mathematics
Despite Goethe's unfavourable affirmations concerning Ossian in his old age, he had set the fashion for Macpherson's publications with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Even after the German ‘Ossianomanie’ had subsided, the bard's intoxicating influence on Werther kept arousing the interest of an international readership in other countries. This contribution will shed more light on Werther translations that partly omitted or expurgated the inserted Ossianic passages, thus ignoring their function as a factor of composition, obscuring the alterations in the protagonist's character and distorting Goethe's deliberate build‐up of the sensual climax.