Overview

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.

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9780813938172

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"“Ossianic Unconformities is an original and imaginative contribution to our interdisciplinary understanding of the importance of James Macpherson in world literature."""" —Dafydd Moore, Plymouth University"

Eric Gidal's Ossianic Unconformities is a persuasive and innovative reading of 'Ossianic space, ' its eighteenth-century emergence, and its implications for modernity and geopoetics. Gidal unearths the world making encoded in Ossianic poetry and its dissemination: if we had thought of Ossianic poems and phenomena via antiquarianism, or cultural nationalism, or emergent poetics, Gidal insists we see them too through stratigraphic, geographic, geologic, and environmental lenses. Both theoretically sophisticated and historically astute, this book opens up new zones for the archipelagic imagination--both for the long eighteenth century and for our own moment. 'Discredited and marginal literature' has rarely looked so central to the irruptive, unfinished project of modernity.--Maureen N. McLane, New York University, author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry

Author Information

Eric Gidal, author of Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, USA.

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