Aftermaths: Walter Scott and Imagining Collective Memory in the Transatlantic World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first chapter examines the phenomenal rise to popularity of Walter Scott’s historical fiction throughout the transatlantic world, in the context of its evocation of collective memory, which was particularly suited to the anxieties of emergent national cultures. In Waverley, Scott employs mnemonic tropes to install a particular mode of modern historical consciousness: the ‘aftermath’, in which the present time is shaped in terms of its proximate relation (measured out in one or two human lifespans) to a moment of historical crux. The time of the Forty-Five is imagined as the catalyst for abrupt and transformational social and cultural change, which not only determined the nation’s present but altered the very pace of history. This chapter shows how Waverley’s example of the ‘aftermath’ provided tropes, models and theoretical frameworks for North American writers for their own expression of national memory. Examples include Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’, John Neal’s Seventy-Six, and Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens. The chapter also traces the literary development of the ‘aftermath’ in the Scottish ‘memorial’ writing of Robert Chambers and Henry Cockburn.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".