Victorian Framings of the Mind: Recent Work on Mid‐Nineteenth Century Theories of the Unconscious, Memory, and Emotion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Surveying recent work by literary critics and historians on Victorian psychology, this article begins with an account of the disciplinary and theoretical shifts that have influenced the way psychology as a field has been reconceptualized in the past decades and then focuses on critical studies that address such topics as the role of Victorian periodicals in the emergence of psychology as a discipline and the persistence of Victorian conceptions of the soul alongside increasingly materialist accounts of mind. It is surprising that, given the richness and depth of recent historical work on the psyche in the Victorian period, it has not informed contemporary trauma theory, the genealogical exploration of which seldom pushes back beyond Freud and then only to focus on the medico‐legal discourse around the railway accident. The second part of the article acknowledges the salience of trauma studies in literary criticism today but points to the theoretical and historical problems of applying contemporary definitions of trauma to Victorian literature. Research on Victorian architectures of the psyche (in particular, states of altered consciousness, theories of memory, trance, emotion, and involuntary thought or ‘unconscious cerebration’) can offer a fuller account of the emergence of trauma as a concept than critics have previously recognized. A historicist account of the theories of mind on which trauma as a concept is dependent may also elucidate the ideological freight of recurrent, structuring binaries such as agency/passivity in both Victorian texts and contemporary trauma and emotion theory.
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 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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".