Renaissances, Resurrections and Rewritings: A Neo-Victorian Poetics of Exhumation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In both Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) the contemporary protagonists find new life in the unearthing of Victorian documents and in this combination of contemporary and Victorian renaissances might be detected the assumption that the revival of the past always already entails a revival of the present. It is the purpose of this paper to try and show that these novels’ determination ‘to take the skeleton remains of a single life and to breathe into them their former actuality’ (Ever After 90), far from being restricted to the diegetic sphere, extends to the very poetic principles of these neo-Victorian works. By overlapping, alternating or combining the voices of the dead and the voices of the living, by interweaving the remains of the past and the reconstructions of the present, by adapting and diversifying their discursive modes according to the referential sources, and by blurring the ontological status of their historical archives, these novels manage to carry out novelistic innovation. It is then the coincidence between the meaning of the prefix neo- in neo-Victorianism and the prefix re- in renaissance that this presentation will seek to highlight underscoring the structures of discontinuous continuities which endow these novels with new life and new aesthetic forms emphatically distinct from those of their Victorian forebears. The renaissances at stake in these neo-Victorian works concern then both a work of testimony and a work of creation, both an exploration of history and a re-enchantment of the present.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".