Review of Howard Gaskill (ed), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (Thoemmes Continuum, 2004)

In his introduction to this symposium on the reception of Ossian in Europe, Howard Gaskill acknowledges that ‘any suggestion of a general rehabilitation’ of James Macpherson ‘would be premature’. But if the task is to be accomplished, a demonstration of the seminal importance of Ossianic poetry for European romanticism is probably the best way forwards. Meanwhile, as several contributors acknowledge, it is curious how perfectly Ossianic poetry fits the requirements of contemporary literary theory. If your interests lie in nationalism and invented traditions, in Romantic forgery, in the oral-literacy debate, in translation studies, in reception theory, in post-modernist indeterminancy, or whatever (except, so far, queer theory), Macpherson is your perfect author, with the added advantage that virtually nobody in Britain reads him.

Review of Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Faber, 2007)
& Clare Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers & Empire (Profile Books, 2007)

In January 1963 in his gap year, Tim Jeal set out by steamer, bus and truck on a journey from Cairo to Johannesburg. Over forty years on, his main memory is of his insecurity, of being utterly dependent on the undependable. To get stranded, a ‘guideless stranger would soon be lost … and likely to die in the bush, if not from thirst or exhaustion then in the jaws of a wild beast’. At night, when he was not fretting about snakes or scorpions, he thought about those Victorian explorers, making similar journeys without diesel trucks or insect repellent creams, and his admiration became a lifetime obsession.

Earlier writers on Africa have had similar epiphanies – George Shepperson, speculating about the Nyasalanders under his command in Burma during World War 2, Jan Vansina made curious by his spell of military service in the Belgian Congo, Basil Davidson wondering in mid-travels why there was nothing he could read about the ancient cities of West Africa. By 1963, along with a handful of others, these had become the founding fathers of the new discipline of African History. Jeal comments that as he passed through independent Uganda and soon to be independent Tanganyika, he knew the explorers were considered ‘anachronistic embarrassments’. But he has stuck with them, and imbibed much of their worldview.

Visiting the Azores for the first time, I’ve figured out just where in the world they are. Ideally, you need a two-page map of the Atlantic, with Lisbon to the right, New York to the far left, and Bermuda lurking in the south west. The nine islands of the archipelago are about a third of the way across. But atlases are grudging about water, and the Azores get squeezed into separate boxes at odd corners of the maps of somewhere else. To my surprise, they turn out to be west of Lisbon – not a hint of Africa, about them – the visible bits of something called the north mid-Atlantic ridge, and on the same latitude as Washington DC.