Saying Goodbye to Mariposa: Robertson Davies’s Deptford and the Small-Town Convention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa is paradigmatic of a type of small-town fiction with which many subsequent texts such as Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business (1970) are in conversation. Davies’s Deptford is simultaneously a product and a rejection of Mariposa’s influence. Through a process of escape and self-discovery, Dunstan Ramsay must negotiate the residue of his Deptford past with his evolving present, and this process helps to reveal how the small-town convention emerges. An initial focus on Dunstan’s sincere attempts at accurately rendering his village enables an exploration of the broader connotations of his explicit knowledge of, temporary reliance on, and eventual abandonment of a small-town archetype epitomized by Mariposa. If Leacock’s town is read as a home place of Canadian fiction and cultural identity, then Fifth Business draws attention to the mode of memory responsible for that type of exegesis. If Mariposa is the past perfect, then Deptford is the past progressive.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".