<i>Robinson Crusoe</i> and the Apparitional Eighteenth-Century Novel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robinson Crusoe attempts to come to terms with his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures (1719) and its sequels by retroactively injecting Providence into the story, but other supernatural forces exert more active narrative agency. With a subtle language of hints, impressions, and passive cogitation, Daniel Defoe implicates middling spirits as interlocutors who contact Crusoe at key moments. Unlike Providence, which Crusoe invokes to help order experience from the vantage of retrospection, a secret converse of spirits confronts characters before they make decisions, and this communication ultimately steers the plot. Crusoe, in turn, becomes apparitional as he projects an identity outside of the fictional frame without clarifying how his story is at once allegorical and historical. This double spectrality of spirits who influence realistic characters and realistic (but invented) characters who assert a kind of existence in society suggests a haunted narratology in the rise of verisimilar fiction, from the proto-novelistic Spectator papers to the sentimental novels of Samuel Richardson.
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.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".