Fiction and the nation: the construction of Canadian identity in <i>Chatelaine</i> and <i>Canadian Home Journal</i> during the 1930s and 1940s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents original research on the mainstream Anglophone Canadian magazines Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal and the way in which they constructed a particular Canadian identity as a result of their own need to market themselves as distinct from American magazines. This identity was necessarily inflected by the expectation that the magazines' audience consisted of the white, middle-class consumers to whom the magazines' advertisers sought to appeal. Fiction played an important part in this process, as magazines were key purveyors of fiction in Canada. Intriguingly, citizenship was at the forefront of how fiction was discussed, as authors' own Canadian identities were highlighted as a common bond between author and reader. The fiction itself was defined by two key traits - its ability to provide an accurate portrayal of a particular region and the way of life of Canadians who inhabited it, and its treatment of an issue or event presumed to be of relevance to readers. This article explores the short stories ‘The Black Siberians’ by Beryl Gray and ‘Spring Always Comes’ by F. Marjorie Jordan, which are representative of these central themes. Examined together, these two works trace out the way in which mainstream periodical literature urged Canadians to think of their nation, and of themselves, with the desire to attain a better life through hard work, an attention to community-building and a willingness to surrender one's personal history and/or heritage in exchange for a desirable future, all coming to the fore as quintessential Canadian qualities.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.081 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".