Epic proportions : post-epic verse-novels and postcolonial critique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis is based on the premise that verse-novels occupy a marginalised and contested position in contemporary literature: as they tread the generic boundaries of poetry and prose writing, they are always marked by their incongruous nature. This makes for uncomfortable reading as expectations are disrupted and undermined, and, for the poet, the adoption of the verse-novel form becomes both a risky and consciously political move. Each of the verse-novels that I consider is self-conscious of its anomalous generic affiliations and utilises them in order to replicate the postcolonial politics of the text. These texts all engage with the verse-novel form in different ways and draw attention to its problematic and marginal nature. This is used to highlight their postcolonial nature, as they are all concerned with matters of racial and national identity in a world where these categories are complicated. The commonality in these works is their relationships with epic form, in this thesis I identify this as a post-epic mode of writing. My study is based on the relationship between poetic form and postcolonial critique; it focuses upon three texts: the Australian poet Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, the Canadian poet Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, and British writer Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe. These texts and their authors call for a reconsideration of postcolonialism; this is both demonstrative of a conceptual shift towards global notions of identity, whilst also being problematic in terms of the political commitment of the texts. Each of these works demonstrates an awareness of the contradictory nature of their positions as they shy away from Utopian visions. In line with this, my aim is to demonstrate the way in which the self-reflexive employment of experimental poetry compliments an engagement with the transformative aspect of contemporary postcolonial politics.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".