The “Persistence” of Ideological “Instability” in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay builds on M. McKeon’s premises in The Origins of the English Novel (1987) in order to explore how Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews struggle to diminish social and cultural instabilities that persisted in the fluctuating attitudes, namely; the aristocratic, progressive and conservative, towards the individual’s honor in their respective social orders. The novels supposedly, according to McKeon, set to resolve these instabilities; however, the essay underscores the novels’ inability to effectively achieve this objective. The essay demonstrates that both Pamela and Joseph Andrews instead internalized the ideological instability as they failed to uphold distinct reformative perspective at the expense of the other. The novels are usually read as culprits of progressive ideals; that is, they advocate for assessing individuals’ worth according to their actions rather than their lineage, which aristocracy historically instilled as a criterion. However, the essay illustrates how the novels simultaneously exhibit the persistence of that conservative model, recycling of aristocracy, which defines people’s honor based on their nurture.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".