Reading Widdershins: a study of romance and A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a romance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study I consider A. S. Byatt’s Possession: a Romance as both an example of and a commentary on its genre. In the first chapter, I explore some reviews of Byatt’s romance, with an emphasis on critical approaches to the book’s genre, and introduce the critical material, including studies of fairy tales, which informs my discussion of romance. In Chapter 2, I analyse the assertion that “Romance is a proper form for women” (Possession 404) and suggest that the form of romance may promote new kinds of social organization by liberating the imagination of writers and readers alike. I build on the theme of romance as a subversive genre in Chapter 3 with a discussion of animal transformation and a comparison of Byatt’ s version of “The Glass Coffm” with Grimm’s more traditional version of the same tale. Chapter 4 includes a discussion of different styles of reading; I concentrate on the relationship between curiosity and faith in Possession in order to suggest some of the implications of this relationship for readers and critics of romance.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".