Thalaba the Destroyer: Southey’s Nationalist “Romance”
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the way in which Southey’s long narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) reflected the process of his changing political position from radicalism to conservatism. My argument reveals that Southey’s use of oriental material in his poem complicated these political responses because his design was dominated by his imperialist ambitions for his own country. Southey’s representation of his young hero’s divine mission against magic, superstition and tyranny is therefore constructed in a way that discusses issues within British as well as Middle Eastern society. For instance, Southey’s depiction of Islam bifurcates into, on the one hand, a positive vision of ancient Islam—that is in fact a personal statement of his own beliefs and values—and on the other, a negative view of modern Islam as a “degraded” religion and society. It is Southey’s intention that the heroic role-model of personal morality and probity that he advocates in Thalaba (and which still operates as a device to criticize his own society, though it replaces his earlier political radicalism) be perceived as embodying ideal “British” characteristics. The supremacy of such “national” values in Southey’s text, justifies their dissemination into other cultures and societies abroad, so promoting here, as in his other works, Britain’s imperial policy abroad.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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