Textual Revision and the Historicity of the Self: Some Factual Inaccuracies in The Prelude
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reading Wordsworth’s Prelude implicates us immediately in the politics of autobiographical writing — which deliberately elides, to use Felicity Nussbaum’s words, “the subject’s fragmentations and discontinuities.” But at the same time, one cannot help suspecting that the seemingly reasonable expectation of factual correctness in autobiography can also mask a deep denial of these essential fragmentations and discontinuities in the name of truth. Wordsworth’s revisions of the Prelude afford an insightful means of understanding these issues: here the imperatives of narrative self-constitution far outweigh the imperatives of literal facts. But the misdating of crucial events — such as the composition of the Glad Preamble — do not detract from its validity as autobiographical writing, but rather gives evidence of the self-problematising nature of origins. In fact, the interest in works such as the Prelude lies not in how closely they adhere to historical particularities, but how tenaciously their metaphoric transcendence resists reduction back to these historical particularities. Romantic subjectivity makes no clear distinction between self and the outer world of phenomena — and also it seems between self and self. This becomes abundantly clear in Wordsworth’s appropriation of Dorothy’s experience. In the Prelude this process is traceable eminently through the process of textual revisions as the present study argues.
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".