<i>Plagiarizing Sir Walter Scott: The Afterlife of Kenilworth in Victorian Quebec</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1880, the French Canadian journalist and politician Frédéric Houde published his only novel, Le manoir mystérieux, ou les victimes de l'ambition, in the Montreal daily newspaper Le nouveau monde. Then Houde's novel seems to have disappeared from the public eye until 1913, when it was recovered, published in book form, and lauded as an original and meritorious text. One year later, a front-page article in the weekly Le nationaliste (Montreal, 1904–24) revealed that Le manoir mystérieux was a plagiarism of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth (1821). Since then, few literary historians have examined Le manoir mystérieux in the wider context of novelistic production in Quebec in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from recent scholarship in the fields of book history and print culture, this article proposes that a close examination of Le manoir mystérieux's contents, together with the material conditions that surrounded its publication in 1880, exposes a wider range of approaches to literary authorship and acceptable literary practice in nineteenth-century Quebec than literary historians have heretofore considered appropriate. The author shifts attention away from the Romantic conceptions of literary originality that have narrowed the range of critical responses to Le manoir mystérieux largely to questions about the ethical repercussions of Houde's literary theft. Instead, she argues that Le manoir mystérieux is metonymous of a larger embattled, albeit creative, mode through which the historical novel developed in Quebec.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".