Mary Shelley Studies: From “Author of <i>Frankenstein</i> ” to “the Great Work of Life”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay traces developments in Mary Shelley studies, which arose in the late 1960s after a period of critical neglect. It looks backward to Victorian conceptions as they were promoted by her heirs to account for a view of Shelley as intellectually timid, a tendency to approach her writings through biographical perspectives, a conviction that her writings diminish in quality after Frankenstein . If interest in Frankenstein dating from the late 1960s served as a catalyst for study of her literary output, a proliferation of work on Shelley has been influenced by the much more recent appearance of scholarly and paperback editions of her writings. Critical trends in criticism of her fictions, biographical writings, travel literature, and editing are briefly surveyed, and the essay concludes with some tentative suggestions about possible directions. Above all, there is a need to continue to look beyond Frankenstein and to view Shelley’s self‐described “great work of life” from a more comprehensive perspective in which she is writing not merely as the wife of Percy Shelley or as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but in her own right.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".