Eric Gidal. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. xi, 240p., ill. ISBN 9780813938172. US $39.50 (hardback).
A significant contribution to the study of the textual afterlife and reception history of James Macpherson’s Ossian productions, Eric Gidal’s wide-ranging Ossianic Unconformities offers detailed considerations of how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars from disciplines such as geology, cartography, philology, history, and archaeology recruited the poems of Ossian as sources of toponymic and environmental evidence for their charting and (imaginative) recovery of landscape, both historical and contemporaneous. Gidal demonstrates that eighteenth-century debates regarding the authenticity of Homer’s epics and the verifying of environmental conditions and geographical loci in the poet’s texts through geological field work reflect wider developments in the charting of territories and the human past. He explains that these discussions in Homeric scholarship were relevant for readers of Macpherson’s work and that they affected the ways in which the poems of Ossian were made meaningful for a diachronic, geomorphological, and ecological-political reconception of modern, increasingly industrialized Scottish and Irish landscapes. The author states in the introduction that he examines how the “conjectural mappings of bardic poetry combined science and sentiment with an increasingly poignant sense of loss as they came to echo Ossian’s lamentations not only for a culture passed out of time but for a natural environment whose permanence could no longer be assured” (4). The result is a persuasive account of the afterlife of Ossian’s poems in the geological-ecological discourses that emerged in the period to chart both the land and its history.
Gidal adopts the title term “unconformity” from the field of geology but, beyond the first two chapters, does not centrally use it, thereby creating the impression that its integration into the overall argument is not essential to the undoubted success of the author’s project. The strength of Gidal’s work consists in its author’s bringing together a range of different texts belonging to varied genres and using a range of discursive systems, at the same time deeply engaging with the poems of Ossian. He insightfully explicates how the editors of various editions of Ossian’s poems take fundamentally different views regarding the texts’ authenticity while, in the process, embracing the geological-ecological turn of works such as, among others, the Reverend John Smith’s Galic Antiquities (1780), Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (which was published over the course of the 1790s), and Hugh Campbell’s 1822 edition of Macpherson’s poems. Furthermore, Gidal’s accounts of the remediations of Ossian’s poems pay attention both to how other readers textually rework these poems’ geographical, ecological, and character-specific data by means of new discursive and scientific systems and how they recruit media such as engraved maps and (less successfully) music to validate their own work or Macpherson’s, or both.
Like the other texts discussed, Sinclair’s work was part of a complex development in antiquarian studies, land surveying, and the recording of human and geographical data. Like those texts, it absorbed some of the information that the lengthy debate regarding the authenticity of the poems of Ossian had made readily available in print. For reasons other than the geological mapping of land, scholars such as Hugh Blair and Malcolm Laing had sought to validate or refute the authenticity of the poems of Ossian. Their reading practices were emulated by writers such as Sinclair and Campbell who paid close attention to the geographical-ecological inscription of Macpherson’s productions and whether the toponymic matrix of the poems could be mapped — via models of geological transformation — onto late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish and Irish geographical areas. It is the recruitment of philological procedures used in Ossian-related scholarship, including conjectural etymologies, that shapes the varied engagement with the landscapes and particular geographical areas (such as Ulster) in Scotland and Ireland. In the process, Ossian’s third-century geographies are harnessed as part of geomorphological explanations that account for changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapes.
Highlights of Ossianic Unconformities are chapters 1-3: in these sections, Gidal provides nuanced considerations of paratextually-framed bodies of the poems of Ossian. While seeking to make sense of Macpherson’s intertextual borrowings from a host of eighteenth-century and classical poets, as Malcolm Laing does in his 1805 edition, other editors transpose the poems into a map of coordinates that are both spatial and temporal, and which can be meaningful for the mapping of the present. The last chapter, with its introduction of Jules Verne, is less central to the geological-ecological argument that Gidal advanced in the earlier chapters, but it demonstrates that even at that time in the nineteenth century the poems of Ossian were still widely remediated.
Ossianic Conformities is a work that will appeal to anyone interested in the afterlife of Ossian. It explains how different (non-literary) genres affected the ways in which the poems of Ossian were recruited as part of a project to map both the past and the present (and forecast the future) of Scotland. Gidal’s study offers challenging contextual readings, and its high standard of scholarship indicates new directions in the interdisciplinary study of literature and its reception.
Sandro Jung
Ghent University
