Rebels, Wanderers, and Castaways: Characterizing Small Social Groups in the Literature of Empire, 1849-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project uses pivotal texts belonging to several nineteenth-century literary subgenres—adventure fiction, school stories, the historical novel and spy fiction—to argue that literary representations of small social circles create distinct narrative shapes and modes of characterization. The small groups that shape these texts generate an ambivalent dynamism of small circles that offers modes of resisting, renegotiating or extending models of authority in the age of empire. While studies of the literature of empire often focus on the figure of the solitary “imperial man” or the consolidation of large imperial bureaucratic systems, the scalar scope of this project considers what lies in between. While the Bildungsroman and the love-plot dominate accounts of nineteenth-century narrative trajectories, small group narratives structure the shape of key genres concerned with empire-building or empire-breaking. The groups I analyze include the castaways of the Robinsonade adventure in Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852); the schoolboy tribes in the school fiction of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) and the stories comprising Rudyard Kipling’s The Complete Stalky Co. (1897-1929); the quadrangle of lovers and friends in Charlotte Brontë’s historical romance Shirley (1849); and the revolutionary circles of Joseph Conrad’s spy novel Under Western Eyes (1911). The small group lends itself to a narrative form in which the character of imperial culture is debated and renegotiated. The interlocking metaphors of kinship and friendship in small-group narratives emphasize the inextricability of individuals from the social. I show how the representations of social interactions within groups are used to challenge racial hierarchies, ideals of national character, and individual agency. Rather than hierarchical patterns of imperial cultural transmission, my readings find that, even in pro-imperial texts, the small group establishes private codes of conduct that run alongside or even against the rules of larger social organizations. The narrative representation of a group’s ability to create networks with other groups models the process of creating cultural change (or, in some cases, maintaining cultural stasis). My analyses demonstrate that the small group form articulates the complexities of governance within imperial space.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".