The Victorian Guitar, Exoticism, and Extinction Discourse from Radcliffe to Wilde
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the often-overlooked Victorian guitar and its place in the musicological history of the long nineteenth century and in various canonical and non-canonical literary representations from those of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Yonge to George Du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, in the light of some Victorian music historians’ and contemporary organologists’ search for a stringed cultural heritage extending to the far reaches of empire. Some Victorian music historians regarded instruments as developmental yardsticks, signifying a culture, nation, or people’s evolutionary progress, a process belonging to what Patrick Brantlinger has called ‘extinction discourse’. In the context of an interdisciplinary discussion of the guitar’s position amid the period’s obsession with uncovering origins and constructing archives, as well as fostering technical innovation—displayed at the Great Exhibition—and shifting modes of performance, this article argues that despite the changing instrument’s rise in status over the period, literary representations adhered to older, sentimental, exotic, spiritual, and, increasingly decadent and homoerotic associations. Anxiety about decadence in concert with calls for preservation but also rationalization of salvaged cultural forms, including musical instruments, led some to advocate a type of musical eugenics, ostensibly to facilitate the creation of a new music 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".