Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s <i>David Simple</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple and David Simple, Volume the Last engage with the social category of real friendship not only in representations of character ties, but also in the development of a third-person narrator that works to embody ideal amity through a triangulation of the reader’s attitude towards characters. In contrasting instances of true and false friendship, the novels generate a radical scepticism that the narrator must deflect by managing access to characters in a manner that stimulates the reader’s faith in their affections. The narrator’s performance of friendship towards character and reader generates contradictions around the epistemology of knowing other minds, the ethics of friendly intimacy, and power relations between writer and audience. In this article, I argue that Fielding’s technique suggests the broader significance of ideal friendship as a privileged moral concept for the history of eighteenth-century fiction.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it