<i>The World My Wilderness</i>and the Possibility of Forgiveness: War, Guilt, Atonement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950), forgiveness affords possibilities to redeem personal and national guilt. Can humankind be forgiven for atrocities perpetrated during the Second Word War, and if so, by whom? Whereas forgiveness can undo the predicament of irreversibility by bringing about reconciliation and an improved future for individuals and communities, those outcomes never come to pass in this novel. Refusal to acknowledge guilt thwarts the likelihood that the future of Europe will differ from the past. Critics usually dismiss Macaulay’s religious thinking as irrelevant, but she freely adapts Christian ideas about atonement and forgiveness to this narrative about guilt. This essay draws upon a wide range of Macaulay’s fictional and critical works, such as Some Religious Elements in English Literature, The Towers of Trebizond, essays about Jonathan Swift and “Religious Writing,” and her biography of John Milton, to argue that wartime guilt and forgiveness regulate midcentury novelistic representation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| 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".