"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".