Riots, Referendums, and Raging Fires: Revisiting History in Recent Newfoundland Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MUCH INK HAS BEEN spent over the past ten years discussing the fictionalization of history in Newfoundland writing, especially historical events such as Confederation and figures such as J.R. Smallwood. No clash between fiction and history has resounded more loudly than the critical responses to Wayne Johnston’s much-celebrated novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), which famously — or notoriously, depending on your viewpoint — re-tells the story of Smallwood’s life. Unsatisfied with Johnston’s free interpretation of Newfoundland history, Rex Murphy criticized the novel in a review published in the Globe and Mail, complaining that the author’s “fictional ventriloquism” resulted in a mere “pastework substitute” for Joey Smallwood, and the former Premier became an entity that was actually “smaller and more wooden” (D15). Stuart Pierson’s review of the novel in Newfoundland Studies offered a substantial list of historical inaccuracies and anachronisms in Johnston’s novel, and concluded that historical fiction “must, if it is to last and be re-read, illuminate the historical record. It must be superior history” (292). Pierson also opined that the sequences in which Johnston is clearly diverging from the historical record and giving free reign
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".