Reimagining postcolonial Sri Lanka as ‘Ceylon’: Shyam Selvadurai’s <i>Cinnamon Gardens</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically evaluates Sri Lankan Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s historical novel Cinnamon Gardens (1998), set in 1927–1928 Ceylon during the Donoughmore Commission’s inquiry into possible self-rule for Ceylon. One of Selvadurai’s lesser-known works, Cinnamon Gardens actively mimics the tone and content of high realist British texts of the nineteenth century as it depicts the lives of the upper-class Tamil bourgeoisie of Colombo. Focusing on the novel’s aesthetic form and portrayal of Ceylon / Sri Lanka, this article investigates Selvadurai’s use of postcolonial historical fiction to articulate questions of history and spatial imagination. My analysis of the dimensions of historical fiction as a genre reveals how Selvadurai’s self-conscious recasting of British realism emerges as a narrative technique that demonstrates a model of derivative realism and its variegated textures when articulated from the peripheral perspective.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".