The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Two: A Critical Heritage ed. by Benjamin Lefebvre, and: The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Three: A Legacy in Review ed. by Benjamin Lefebvre (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Benjamin Lefebvre (ed.), The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Two: A Critical Heritage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 464pp. Cased. $55. ISBN 978-1-4426-4492-2.Benjamin Lefebvre (ed.), The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Three: A Legacy in Review (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 464pp. Cased. $55. ISBN 978-1-4426-4493-9.Upon reading Benjamin Lefebvre's introduction to the second volume of his L.M. Montgomery Reader, which appears to catalogue nearly every major piece of scholarly criticism about Montgomery, one is immediately struck by the meticulous and exhaustive nature of the archival research that went into the creation of this three-volume series. Indeed, Lefebvre's introductions to these two volumes are valuable resources in themselves, impressively charting changes in the promotion and reputation of Montgomery's work both within her lifetime and after her death. Both of these introductions also draw attention to the struggle - of both academic critics and contemporary reviewers - to categorise Montgomery's work due to her novels' appeal to readers of all ages and the tendency to try and diminish them to the status of 'juvenile fiction'. In volume two, Lefebvre notes the intriguing shift from classifying Montgomery's novels as 'stories of children' to 'books for teen-aged girls' (p. 9), while volume three draws attention to the bifurcation of Anne of Green Gables' 'bestseller' status due to its inconsistent categorisation.A Critical Heritage collates 20 samples of Montgomery scholarship to illustrate shifts in Montgomery's literary reputation and critical approaches to her work. Lefebvre's introduction details the 'milestones' and 'turning points' in the gradual development of Montgomery studies as Montgomery's own status within the canon of Canadian literature solidified, while acknowledging that her novels continued to sell well throughout the twentieth century, regardless of her critical standing. To avoid excerpting, this collection favours criticism that first appeared in periodicals or collected volumes, and many of the articles featured in this reader are considered seminal within the field of Montgomery studies but, until the publication of this volume, have remained hard to locate - especially for those interested in studying Montgomery from the UK.While some of the earliest collected articles focus on region and form (T.D. MacLulich), others respond to the increased tendency, identified elsewhere by Irene Gammel, to read Montgomery's novels 'through the lens of the journals' (p. 27), with Helen Buss's 'Decoding L.M. Montgomery's Journals' focusing specifically on life writing and the journals themselves as texts for critical study. Two samples by Carole Gerson and Laura M. Robinson from Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture (1995) engage with early feminist debates surrounding Montgomery's work, both in her lifetime and after her death; while essays by Elizabeth Epperly, Vanessa Brown, and Lefebvre take more archival approaches that consider Montgomery through the lens of book history. Notably, while studies by Mary Rubio and Gammel contextualise Montgomery's work in relation to her contemporaries, Monique Dull draws attention to a potential 'kindred spirit' of Anne of Green Gables in the 1848 novel Amelia by Eliza Leslie.A Legacy in Review turns to reception history and focuses on the marketing strategies utilised by book reviewers and advertisers to promote Montgomery's work upon first publication. …
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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 | 0.008 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.033 |
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".