Ossianic Telegraphy: Bardic Networks and Imperial Relays

Relates James Macpherson\u27s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) and other Ossianic poems to evolving Scottish networks of commerce and communication, especially commercial telegraphy and the postal system, and posits associations also with comments in Adam Smith\u27s Lectures on Jurisprudence and Theory of Moral Sentiments, to suggest that Macpherson\u27s remediation of oral poetry asserted ideas of authorial identity and readership as relays in a new imperial network