In Want of Keeping: Painting and the Sympathetic Imagination of <i>Frankenstein</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term “keeping” is central to conceptions of novelistic sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). A painterly term that refers to an artist’s ability to distinguish between prominent and subordinate figures, keeping offers Shelley a model for aesthetically managed harmony. I engage with the term’s resonances with historically related terms, namely William Hazlitt’s concept of gusto, to argue that Shelley employs keeping to elicit readerly sympathies. It is the frame narrative in particular that carries out the regulatory function of keeping by organizing the novel’s disparate pieces. Her treatment of the Creature offers the most substantial instantiation of this dynamic. While he wants for keeping as Victor’s creation, overwhelming other characters with his discordance, the frame narrative subordinates his physicality so that sympathizing with him becomes manageable for Shelley’s readers. By attributing the sympathetic success of Frankenstein to keeping, I situate Shelley in an aesthetic tradition that sees sympathy as a result of the artist’s own careful aesthetic management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".