The National Allegory of Fraternity: Loyalist Literature and the Making of Canada’s White British Origins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay critically examines a rhetorical trope that contributed significantly to the naturalization of white British masculinity as the assumed norm for Canadian citizenship, the “allegory of fraternity” - and particularly its menacing corollary of fratricide - reappears over a 100-year span (1840 to 1943) in novels, epic poems and verse dramas that posit the United Empire Loyalists as the nation’s progenitors, especially through the times of testing they and their descendants endured in the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War, and the Rebellions of 1837. The essay argues that this recurrent allegory conveys a nervous, “unofficial curriculum” which promotes a specific form of whiteness — patterned after the British officer class’s code of honour and enterprise — as the natural order for the Canadian nation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".