Conjuring Ghosts of the Past: Landscapes and Hauntings in Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jane Urquhart’s novel The Stone Carvers (2001) portrays the struggles of a community of German immigrants in the nineteenth century, as they attempt to settle in Western Ontario; it also includes a fictionalized account of the construction of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial 1 (for First World War Canadian dead, and missing, presumed dead, in France). The article explores the issues of dealing with loss, and re-living the past, which are interwoven by Urquhart into a larger narrative, forming an ongoing meditation on the experience of ‘in-betweenness’— transgressing not only spatial, but also temporal boundaries— and incorporating individual and communal histories as they are passed on through generations. The lives of Urquhart’s characters are marked by the ambivalence of belonging— the experience of having more than one homeland, in more than one landscape. They are haunted by lost places, and by the memory of people who perished as a result of war, or who they left behind in the course of their own personal journey. The article explores the issue of ‘landscape biography’, and also examines Urquhart’s employment of the literary topoi of nekuia/katabasis (i.e., encounters with the dead). It demonstrates how the confrontation with the past becomes, in the novel, a prerequisite for regeneration of the present, and the establishment of the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".