National Histories, International Genre: Thackeray, Balzac, and the Franco-British Bildungsroman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
TheBildungsromangenre poses a productive challenge for the study of Victorian internationalisms. On the one hand, scholars of German literature often contend that the genre is inextricably tied to German concepts of culture and nationhood; on the other hand, half a century of scholarly practice has linked the term “Bildungsroman” to novels of personal education across Europe and beyond. Seeking to interrogate, rather than simply assume, the internationalism of theBildungsromangenre, I focus on the Franco-British literary exchanges inscribed in a major VictorianBildungsroman, William Makepeace Thackeray’sPendennis. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and historical models, including Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s concept of the “Channel zone,” I suggest thatPendennisforms a point of intersection between the British and French national traditions of theBildungsroman, thus allowing us to see how a genre with a German name was modified in its passage between France and Britain. Although Thackeray is often thought of as an apolitical writer—a satirist concerned only with the manners and morals of the middle and upper classes—I argue thatPendenniswas crucially shaped by his engagement with the French Revolution of 1848. In order to face and exorcise the threat of revolution, I further suggest, Thackeray turned to the FrenchBildungsromantradition; my hypothesis is that Thackeray reworked Balzac’sLost Illusions, transforming Balzac’s narrative of revolutionary dislocation into a self-consciously British narrative of peaceful change. By working both with and against French literary models, Thackeray reveals the formation of British identity as a complex process of cross-Channel negotiation, rather than a simple negation of the French “other.”
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".