Pity, or the Providence of the Body in Richardson’s Clarissa
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, pity, which traditionally had been seen as a morally suspect rhetorical effect, is embraced as an authenticating vehicle of social consensus and political critique. This essay examines pity’s mediatory instrumentality, the historical rationale for its rise in the eighteenth century, and the corresponding ways in which its new sociopolitical status inspires formal innovation and alternative visions of ethical communion in Clarissa . Anxious about change but eager to develop a vision of human nature and social coherence antithetical to the Hobbesean version, its proponents conceived of pity as a natural reflex, an embodied yet sanctified impulse capable of transforming fictional suffering and readerly experience into a medium of solidarity. By transferring to the affects the ethical-spiritual authority and the aesthetic function conventionally afforded to the will, reason, and their equivalent literary conventions—poetic justice, Horatian decorum, and the unified plot—in Clarissa , I argue, Samuel Richardson seeks to make pity a dynamic engine of social, literary-formal, and religious reformation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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