BONNIE LATIMER. Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern readers of Samuel Richardson’s novels are often surprised to hear both that Sir Charles Grandison was Jane Austen’s favourite and that she was not alone in singing its praises. In Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual, Bonnie Latimer does her part to save Richardson’s last novel from its recent critical fate of being overshadowed by both Pamela and Clarissa. Latimer’s book asks and presents us with interesting answers to the question, ‘How does Richardson’s canon—and perhaps even the mid-century novel—look different when viewed through the lens of Grandison?’ (p. 3). However, meticulously researched and expansive in scope, Making Gender accomplishes more than the rehabilitation of Grandison’s reputation. Latimer deftly draws on a variety of well-known and obscure eighteenth-century sources to provide background for her argument that Richardson’s fictions played a vital role in ‘a cultural shift according to which women became imaginable as individuals—that is to say, as stable, autonomous, contained and rational selves’ (p. 3). Over the course of five chapters, which tackle complex subjects with impressive control (such as eighteenth-century understandings of the ‘individual’, ‘reason’, and ‘virtue’), Making Gender ‘offers a recuperative reading of Richardson’s slippery mixture of radicalism and conservatism, his innovation and recalcitrance, by re-situating the entire canon in useful contexts’ (pp. 6-7). It promises to be a valuable resource for scholars interested not only in the author and his works but also in gender studies and the history of the novel.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.010 |
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".