Shame and Futile Masculinity: Feeling Backwards in Henry Mackenzie’s <i>Man of Feeling</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eighteenth-century masculinity, despite some important interventions in recent decades, remains an underdeveloped area in literary studies of the period. This essay seeks to redress the balance by reconsidering a now canonical text, the popular sentimental novel The Man of Feeling (1771), in light of the insights that theories of queerness and affect, particularly shame, have to offer to historical studies of masculinity. My argument takes as its starting point the contention that all normative social structures must incorporate, rather than entirely expel, the non-normative in order to function. Engaging with theorists including Lee Edelman and Heather Love, I argue that Harley, the hero of Henry Mackenzie’s novel, should be understood as an embodiment of weak sexualization, a figure who refuses the positive progress of capital accumulation for wilful oblivion. In doing so, the essay provides new ways of thinking through eighteenth-century ideas of masculinity that demonstrate that the queer, the backward, and the weak are integrated within normative con temporary discourses of the masculine, rather than excluded from them.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".