A Timeless Imagined Prairie: Return and Regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objectives of this essay are threefold: first, to describe a feminist Canadian literary modernism in order to draw attention to revisionsthat need to take place in the conception of a misleadingly unqualified modernism; second, to locate this strain of modernism historically, geographically, and aesthetically; and third, to analyze time' -space compression as a crucial aspect of feminist Canadian literary modernism. This essay argues that Margaret Laurence's Manawaka novels-The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), .The Fire-Dwellers (1969), and The Diviners (1974) are representative of a modernist strain of literature closely associated with nationalist and feminist movements that took phace in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, it responds to the question "When is the Prairie?" by suggesting that the prairie is timeless because it is an imagined construct that resists occupying a single time. Instead, it is a fluid coordinate on a space-time continuum that challenges homogeneous models of nationalism and modernism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".