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Record W4246058917 · doi:10.3138/utq.79.4.1096

Decorating Fiction: Edith Wharton's Literary Architecture

2010· article· en· W4246058917 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Liisa Stephenson

Bibliographic record

VenueUniversity of Toronto Quarterly · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican and British Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArchitectureHonorArtLiteratureArt historyInterior designStyle (visual arts)Visual artsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Drawing on the nineteenth-century analogic tradition exemplified by Walter Pater, Honoré de Balzac, and Henry James, this essay considers the conjunction of literature and architecture in Edith Wharton's oeuvre, and particularly her custom of relating novelistic form to architectural design. Her bestselling novel The House of Mirth and her non-fiction work The Writing of Fiction are identified as literary counterparts to Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses, a manual of interior design co-authored with architect Ogden Codman. Given Wharton's lifelong interest in architecture and material culture, this essay suggests that she conceived of the modern novel as a product of design, as primarily architectural or constructed space. Windows, thresholds, and furniture, as well as libraries and other interior spaces, figure centrally in her work. The confluence of literary and architectural principles is featured in The House of Mirth, a novel in which the author's skill is equivalent to the architect's, and where the decorative allure of protagonist Lily Bart renders her disturbingly analogous to a rare book. By examining key library scenes in the novel, this essay offers new insight on the decorative appeal of Wharton's work while calling attention to an underlying ethical dimension of her literary architecture.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.027
Threshold uncertainty score0.054

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.016
Scholarly communication0.0090.003
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.004
GPT teacher head0.166
Teacher spread0.162 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueUniversity of Toronto QuarterlySame topicAmerican and British Literature AnalysisFrench-language works237,207