“Having Cleared and Embellished the Earth”: Agricultural Science and Poetic Tradition in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critics have long noted a discrepancy between Canadian landscape and the imported European literary forms early Canadian writers used to describe a young country. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, some parts of the landscape were actively transformed in ways that would seemingly preclude the need for poets to transform their literary inheritance. This essay examines agricultural reform initiatives in Nova Scotia, which included deforestation in the interest of warming the temperature, as espoused in letters published in the Acadian Recorder. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village, the essay locates a poetics at once beholden to English literary tradition and celebratory of indigenous flora and fauna's "native exoticism," both of which embrace a transformation of British North America into some place familiar to settler-colonials. Although the paradigmatic reading of early Canadian literature as struggling to fit English literary forms to a new landscape remains accurate, this reading of The Rising Village demonstrates how that paradigm struggled to gain acceptance.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".