Un-American Milton: Milton's Reputation and Reception in the Early United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent accounts of Milton in early America manifest a tendency towards de-historicizing revisionism, overestimating the degree to which Milton's radicalism was ‘mainstream,’ and thereby underestimating the way Milton's originality set many American writers at odds with the conventions of their time. Joel Barlow and Herman Melville illustrate the point. Rewriting Michael's vision of the future at the end of Paradise Lost, Barlow's Columbiad transforms Milton's typological understanding of history into an Enlightenment fantasy of progress by drawing on Milton's account of creation in Book VII. In collapsing the distinction between the pre- and the post-lapsarian, the poem thus questions the contemporary inhibiting power of the Fall – for in Barlow American commercial expansion appears ‘always already’ a manifestation of regeneration. In rewriting Milton's Paradise Regained as an allegory of capitalism, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener moves in the opposite direction. Bartleby's intractability, his refusal to comply with his employer's request to share in the work of the other scriveners, invokes Jesus' refusal of Satan's worldly good sense, producing an immoveable unworldliness that calls into question the norms of quotidian American capitalism.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".