Rational Rickets and Reluctant Canadians: Gothic Colonial Cringe in Robertson Davies’s High Spirits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robertson Davies’ sardonic portrayals of small-town Canadian society expose its paralyzing proprieties in comically Gothic terms. Influenced by the humorous ghost stories of his Canadian literary predecessor Stephen Leacock, Davies undertook his own mode of affectionate ghostlyparody. On many occasions, Davies lamented Canada’s “rational rickets”, its failure to accommodate Old-World ghosts. To conjure such ghosts is to affirm the lack of “local”candidates; to not have such ghosts is to be forever condemned to lament their absence. In his ghost stories, Davies, with characteristic self-irony, confronts this paradox head-on. As Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, Davies wrote a ghost story every year for the Massey College annual “Gaudy Night” celebrations from 1963 to 1980, which are collected in his 1982 collection High Spirits. As he argues in the introduction, Canadian culture lacked a suitably fulfilling Gothic pedigree, which translated into a conviction that Canada – and Canadians -- lacked imagination. Davies’ biographer, Judith Skelton Grant, refers to his “reluctant Canadianism” (632), the embarrassment that the Anglophilic Davies felt in response to his colonial origins. This obsession finds expression in Davies’ fictional Gothic manifestations,often as a kind of return of a repressed colonial Gothic cringe.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".