Inaction, Indecision, and Public Politics in Gissing's <i>Veranilda</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines George Gissing's unfinished novel Veranilda (1904) to argue for the insights that it imparts on the debates between individual agency and deterministic circumstances, and between action and inaction. Criticism has performed the crucial task of situating the novel in the contexts of Gissing's oeuvre, his study of the Classics, and its publication. My essay contributes to scholarship by attending to the development of Basil, the central protagonist, to reveal the value of indecision and inaction in the context of the novel's political climate. I begin by analysing the conclusions that have been put forward by Gissing's contemporaries and especially the ending that is foreshadowed by the published text. In so doing, I show how Veranilda seems to insist upon the futility of an individual's actions notwithstanding his or her best intentions. I go on to analyse Basil's social position as an aristocrat, discussing how its attendant qualities in class and bearing could not have prepared him for the challenges of dealing with the story's conflicts. Where Basil begins as a very real victim of circumstance, I trace his development of independence and free will – terms that have particular force when applied to Gissing's wider oeuvre.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it