Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several important novels were published in Canada in 1954.They include Mordecai Richler's first book, The Acrobats, Fred Bodsworth's The Last of the Curlews, Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore, Robertson Davies' expertly crafted, Leaven of Malice, and what proved to be Ethel Wilson's masterwork, Swamp Angel.It was a bonanza year in fiction and these titles are still in print.Yet the Governor General's Award for 1954 went to a novel that has been forgotten, lgor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan.Why was this anti-Communist spy novel, written by a Soviet defector and translated into English, so highly regarded by the arbiters of Canadian culture in the 1950s?What does it say about Canadian literature and social values in the 1950s that this novel, which has earned only a brief mention in The Literary History of Canada, was so highly prized at that time?I see this curious aberration in literary judgement as symptomatic of something larger in Canadian society and use it to conduct an analysis of class and political ideology in selected Canadian fiction of the 1950s.As part of North America, Canada has followed the United States and made anti-Communism part of Canadian government policy.This political background and the events that ensued in the 1950s inevitably affected and decided the ideology of Canadian writers and are reflected in their works.The chief difference among the writers as they mirror the perceived social and political reality is that some became the speakers for the ruling class in art and literature while others, despite their desire to reflect the ideology and needs of those from the lower order -the left-wing and the working class --, still could not escape the bonds of the prevailing ideology around them.The primary purpose of this essay, through analyzing works by Morley Callaghan, Ethel Wilson, Hugh MacLennan, and Mordecai Richler, is to study the range of literary responses to the Cold War politics of the 1950s and to measure the degree to which the dominant conservatism and concomitant fear of Communism shaped the literature of Canada in this period.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.034 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".