The Geography of Negotiation: Wales, Anglo-Scottish Sympathy, and Tobias Smollett
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their recent reflections on the literary production of the British nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen adapt Homi Bhabha's notions of ambiguity, slippage and the nation to analyze the way in which British literature negotiates Anglo-Scottish identity. Though both writers are cautious in their application of postcolonial theory to Britain, they recognize its potential, within certain limits, to address the presence of internal hierarchical relationships established through efforts that, at times, 'resemble colonial practices' (Sorensen, 3). This essay takes a similar theoretical approach to the negotiation of Great Britain in Tobias Smollett's Expedition of Humphry Clinker. It hopes to demonstrate that Smollett's use of Wales and Welshness can be illuminated by Bhabha's exploration of ambivalence and the nation. Bhabha argues that 'the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy -and an apparatus of power -[is] that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even mtonymie, categories, like the people, minorities, or "cultural difference" that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation' (292). Davis inserts authorial agency into this concept of ambivalence, noting that the eighteenth-century authors who imagined Britain were 'conscious that they were in the process of composing their image' (4). The conflict and ambiguity present in various literary conceptions of the imagined nation produced in this period, she suggests, reflect the struggle of the literati to negotiate 'between the incommensurabilities of its [Britain's] internal populations' (5). My argument is that Smollett, in his final novel, uses Wales as a nebulous mtonymie category, a British space in which he can accomplish this act of negotiation, particularly as it pertains to Anglo-Scottish relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".