Title
Johnson on Truth Telling in Life and Literature: A Book on Culture Wars in Imperial Great Britain
Document Type
Grant Proposal
Date Accepted
Fall 2004
Project Description/Abstract
A combined Faculty Grant and Summer Stipend would fund two weeks of archival research in the British Isles (mid-May) and a month of scholarship (Summer Session II) at home and at Yale’s Beineke Library to the specific end of completing Chapters 1-4 in my book, National Culture Wars in Imperial Great Britain: Johnson, Ossian, and Literary Forgery for Penn State University Press. I am also invited to publish a major article of the subject next summer in The Age of Johnson: A scholarly Annual by the editor, Professor Paul J. Korshin. My focus is Samuel Johnson’s debunking of the most successful forgery in literary history, namely James Macpherson’s fraudulent Ossian Poetry (1760-73). Your grant will help me to elucidate the controversy, make public an unknown writing on Ossian by Johnson, and correct misleading modern scholarship about the forgery.
Recommended Citation
Curley, Thomas M. (2004). Johnson on Truth Telling in Life and Literature: A Book on Culture Wars in Imperial Great Britain. Faculty and Librarian Research Grants (FLRG). Item 109.
https://vc.bridgew.edu/flrg_grant/109