Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age

In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who sought to establish the authenticity of the epic poetry of Ossian, created by James Macpherson and presented as genuine translations of a fictionalized thirdcentury Caledonian bard. Through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, these writings indirectly came to record the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.