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Record W310944287

Dickens, Niagara Falls and the Watery Sublime

2009· article· en· W310944287 on OpenAlex
Natalie McKnight

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueDickens quarterly · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTravel Writing and Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHeavenBeautyContext (archaeology)Art historyHistorySublimeNarrativeArtMajestyLiteratureArchaeologyAesthetics
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dickens felt transported by sublimity of Niagara Falls when he visited it on his 1842 journey United States and Canada. In a letter Forster (26 April 1842), he said of Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian side of Niagara) that It would be hard for a man stand nearer God than he does there (Letters 3: 210). Dickens proceeds effuse over beauty and majesty of falls in a passage that forms chief part of his description of his experience in American Notes, although letter actually offers superior account: There was a bright rainbow at my feet; and from that I looked up --great Heaven! To what a fall of bright green water! The broad, deep, mighty stream seems die in act of falling; and, from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with same dread solemnity--perhaps from creation of world (Letters 3: 210-11). In this essay, I analyze Dickens's reaction Niagara Falls in context of other British travel narratives from previous decade, and examine how Niagara speaks Dickens of life after death (as he describes it above, falls die and then rise again in ghostly mist). His profound experience at Niagara Falls shaped his treatment of climactic, transcendent moments in subsequent novels; in particular, from this point on Dickens repeatedly uses water imagery (especially seas, swamps and rivers) as symbols of death, rebirth, transformation and of being disturbed with the joy of elevated thoughts, use Wordsworth's phrase in Tintern Abbey. But Dickens's reaction was more than just a typical Romantic experience, similar those of other nineteenth-century British travelers; it was in part shaped by his overall disappointment in America and his relief be on English ground again. Niagara Falls fulfills several definitions of sublime. Philosophers since Longinus have used term refer experiences that go beyond everyday, that inspire awe, that involve a sense of grandeur, that elevate one's thoughts and feelings and that exceed capacity of human descriptive powers. Longinus, of course, used term in reference rhetoric, but later philosophers found many of same qualities in sublime scenes of nature. Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful (1757) emphasized role of terror in sublime, for only presence of fear, he felt, could account for complete overwhelming of all other thoughts and sensations in experiencing sublime scenes in nature. Alexander Gerard in An Essay on Taste (1759) stressed importance of physical immensity in experience of sublime: When a large object is presented, mind expands itself extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration (11). Similarly, Romantics, and particularly Wordsworth, felt that natural scenes that impress viewer with their immensity and particularly their power, such as mountains or waterfalls, create sublime sensations that feed soul and poetic imagination both at moment and in future by aid of imagination and memory. Niagara Falls embodies all qualities traditionally associated with sublime--its immensity, power, and beauty overawe viewers, reminding them, particularly in nineteenth-century accounts, of presence of other awe-inspiring forces such as death and God. Niagara Falls, oddly enough, fits even scientific definition of sublime, which is to cause pass from solid vapor state by heating and again condense solid form. Not by heating but by motion and pressure falls turn water into vapor, ever present mist that surrounds them, and vapor eventually returns again falls, a cycle that led Dickens use death/resurrection imagery in description quoted above (i. …

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.926
Threshold uncertainty score0.719

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.184
Teacher spread0.177 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it