Although astoundingly popular, the Ossian poems, first fragments and then full epic poems “translated” by James Macpherson, who claimed he had found them as ancient manuscripts in the Highlands, addressed profound epistemological challenges. David Hume had pressed the limits of what could be known empirically, revealing the disconnect between experience and commonly held assumptions regarding causality and identity. The Ossian poems sought, as Ian Duncan has argued in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004), to fill in connections—between experience and causal relations, between experience in the present and continuous past identity—where, as Hume's radical empiricism had shown, there were, and could be, none. The gaps between experience and temporal and spatial conceptualizations only grew after the initial publication of the Ossian poems in the 1760s. Discoveries within, and emerging disciplinary formations of, geology and philology exposed and foregrounded long, slow time nearly inconceivable to the human mind. Whether in geology's reckoning with fossils or in philology's etymological interest in ancient words, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British thinkers confronted a widening gap between experience in the present and the necessarily vast time in which changes, imperceptible in any given moment, took place. Alongside those reckonings appeared ever more editions of the Ossian poems and writings on them, from tourist guides supposedly identifying key sites from the poems in Scotland (and Ireland) to hefty volumes aiming to establish the antiquity of the poems via present-day connections—in language, in geography—to the remote past the poems represent.

The sense of a disconnect with the past that this writing aimed to overcome was, of course, compounded by a future that seemed to be moving forward ever faster, as expanding markets and industrial development encroached on present ways of being. In his thoughtful and insightful Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Era, Eric Gidal tracks the way in which the Ossian poems and their reception attempted to mediate between a bardic past, a world imagined as one of organic community and its oral recitation and song, and a present bereft of such a tightknit model of society and its supposedly unmediated expression. That present, nonetheless, seemed to offer compensatory technologies, particularly genres of commercial print, which might preserve connections to the past into the future. Some of the most moving passages in the Ossian poems contemplate the impossibility of connection over time. A bard or another storyteller describes unmarked graves in a dazzlingly sunlit but empty mountain landscape of the future, a scene oblivious to the battles, loves, and lives lost that the poems recount. While such melancholic projections mark the disappearance of an heroic past, they also stand as a figure for any reader's evaporating relation to the future in an era of rapid socioeconomic—and slow geologic—transformations. In extensive prefatory material, appendices, and footnotes Gidal demonstrates that the Ossian poems seek to overcome that threat of disappearance. Appearing on the same page as bardic tales of lost valor and sentiment, footnotes make legible connections between that past world and the reader's present. Noting that a particular place name still exists in the Highlands, for instance, etymological footnotes tracing shifts in meaning over time but nonetheless locating a term in present experience offer the slender promise of continuity.

One of Gidal's most original and significant contributions is to see in the reception history of these poems in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a shared impulse to face and surmount the increasing sense of a breach between experience and abstract knowledge, between moments in time. Gidal offers careful, perceptive readings of a series of projects, spanning over more than hundred years, that turn to representational technologies—philological, statistical, cartographic, geomorphological—as they aim to extend, supplement and legitimate the Ossian poems. Like the Ossian poems themselves, these eighteenth-century commentaries from Hugh Blair and John Sinclair, mid-nineteenth-century editions of the poems from Malcolm Laing and Hugh Campbell, and the hefty 1875 compendium of Peter Waddell stuffed with maps, charts, newspaper articles, and heliotypes, offer textual forms that would “fill in” the gaps. Like the original editions of the Ossian poems, they attempt to call up the otherwise unknowable: the experience of topography of the past, of dispersed populations. As they do so, these works turn to a variety of media—map, chart, photograph—and Gidal is particularly strong at investigating how these media speak to and sometimes disturb each other. In the effects their interactions produce, these works do less to confirm the ancientness of the Ossian poems than to authenticate “the subjective navigation of the reader” (49).

One fascinating element of the book is Gidal's identification of parallel efforts to map the works of Homer, particularly in Thomas Blackwell's and Robert Wood's eighteenth-century writings. While reception of the Ossian poems drew from this material, the location of the Ossian poems and their rich supplemental history in Scotland was crucial. For the course of historical continuity at which the Ossian poems and the mounds of writing on them aimed never did run smooth. They indexed, perhaps despite their best efforts, “unconformities,” a term Gidal borrows from earth science to describe breaks in geological history. Such breaks found a compelling visualization in early geologist James Hutton's graphic cross sections of the earth's layers, in which uniformly horizontal layers are suddenly interrupted by jagged vertical intrusions. These “unconformities” display how temporality is heterogeneous. Enlightenment Scotland itself had produced the concept of conjectural or stadial history, in which history constitutes a progressive movement through a predictable series of stages of economic and social organization. And yet the Highlands of Scotland posed a kind of unconformity, an anachronistic aberration, past in the present, which troubled the idea of homogeneous time. As James Chandler has argued (in his 1998 England in 1819), it might be that stadial history itself made this particular version of unconformity, the anachronism, possible. Yet the location of that anachronistic society on the borders of polite “advanced” metropolises disturbed the very narratives regarding ineluctable sequential continuity told there. Inversely, the attribution of polite, “advanced” sentiments to the “primitive” society of Ossian also suggests what Gidal refers to as “unconformities.”

For Macpherson's hostile critics, such “unconformities” signaled the writing's status as forgery. Gidal offers a persuasive revision of such readings, as he explains his use of “unconformities” as a “conceit to explore how a marginalized … literature provides a compelling language to register and reflect upon the social and spatial disruptions of industrial modernity and the stratigraphic consciousness of geological deep time” (12). Itself a work of remarkable recovery and excavation, Ossianic Unconformities reanimates the long-marginalized tomes assuming or attempting to prove the “authenticity” of the Ossian poems, works neglected after Macpherson's claims to have merely “translated” ancient Scots Gaelic manuscripts had been discredited. Revising the terms of the old debates, Gidal argues that authenticity lies not in pure representation of static location, continuous identity, or past seamlessly transformed into present, but in noisy mediation, incomplete (because impossible) translation, and movement through or beyond (via the figure of the ship Gidal explores) a changing landscape. Authenticity, he shows, might best take the form of texts unwittingly exposing the disconnections between experience and abstraction, between past, present, and future.