The Empty Decade? English Fiction in the 1730s
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prose fictions from Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) to works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood in the 1720s are well known, as are the great novels published beginning in the 1740s by Samuel Richardson, Sarah and Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and many more. Fiction published in the 1730s, in contrast, is little studied. This essay and a chart of all fiction, including translations, published in that decade aim to place this fiction in the history of the English novel and argue that the period was a time when transformative elements, such as a stronger politicization of texts, became common. Older forms survived but also were adapted or even revolutionized, and glimmers of the new shapes and purposes of novels emerged.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 it