{"product_id":"ossianic-unconformities-bardic-poetry-in-the-industrial-age-9780813938172","title":"Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a sequence of publications in the 1760s, James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher in the central Highlands, created fantastic epics of ancient heroes and presented them as genuine translations of the poetry of Ossian, a fictionalized Caledonian bard of the third century. In \u003ci\u003eOssianic Unconformities\u003c\/i\u003e Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who used statistics, cartography, and geomorphology to map and thereby vindicate Macpherson's controversial eighteenth-century renderings of Gaelic oral traditions. Although these writers primarily sought to establish the authenticity of Macpherson's \"translations,\" they came to record, through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Their obsessive and elaborate attempts to fix both the poetry and the land into a stable set of coordinates developed what we can now perceive as a nascent ecological perspective on literature in a changing world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGidal examines the details of these imaginary geographies in conjunction with the social and spatial histories of Belfast and the River Lagan valley, Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, and the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, regions that form both the sixth-century kingdom of D l Riata and the fabled terrain of the Ossianic poems. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, \u003ci\u003eOssianic Unconformities\u003c\/i\u003e unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Eric Gidal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Virginia Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/25\/2015\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSeries:\u003c\/b\u003e Under the Sign of Nature\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 240\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.50h x 6.30w x 0.90d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780813938172","brand":"University of Virginia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43293821075593,"sku":"9780813938172","price":39.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0636\/9240\/6921\/files\/img_6c268ad3-d4b7-4b0b-82e1-b6ae29e4582d.jpg?v=1737443804","url":"https:\/\/sonsanddaughtersbooks.com\/products\/ossianic-unconformities-bardic-poetry-in-the-industrial-age-9780813938172","provider":"Sons and Daughters Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}