Making a Difference: Canadian Women Writers and the Fiction of Social Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January 1944, when the influential Toronto critic William Arthur Deacon lamented the absence of a Canadian “equivalent of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’” because Canadians are “still pioneering, still afraid of ourselves intellectually and emotionally,”[1] little did he know that a significant candidate was on the horizon. Gwethalyn Graham’s second novel, Earth and High Heaven, which appeared later that year, launched an analysis of anti-Semitism that was quickly embraced by cultural arbiters and the general public in both Canada and the United States. This essay situates the production and reception history of Graham’s book in relation to other novels by English-Canadian women writers that advocated for social change, and offers cases studies of the three most widely disseminated works that used the power of fiction to marshal empathy: Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1894), Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981). [1]W.A. Deacon, “Gearing the Arts in Canada to Postwar Nation-Building,” Globe and Mail, 1 January 1944: 13.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.079 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".