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Record W4409312974 · doi:10.3138/ecf.2023-0075

What Is Eighteenth-Century Fiction?

2025· article· en· W4409312974 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Wendy Anne Lee

Bibliographic record

VenueEighteenth-Century Fiction · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicRenaissance Literature and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryLiteratureArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article argues that, for better and for worse, the novel is still the eighteenth-century novel and goes on to investigate why that is so. Reviving John Richetti’s claim that we have outlived the “ideological needs” served by “realism and psychological verisimilitude,” the author asks what the persistence of this mode of fictionality implies about the ongoing need for such a conventionalized form. The author tests the idea advanced by Catherine Gallagher that fictional characters restore readers to a sense of ontological fullness. She then turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748) and Frances Ferguson’s recent analysis of the influence of shorthand transcription on Richardson to examine Ferguson’s claim that stenography (as a representational mode of “your thoughts and words in my hand”) is a distillation of free indirect style. Ferguson’s formulation leads the author to D.W. Winnicott’s psychoanalytic framework of holding and to the proposal that the purpose of the (still eighteenth-century) novel is to facilitate vital processes of disintegration through an experience of presence.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Scholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.763
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0020.002
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

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 head0.011
GPT teacher head0.232
Teacher spread0.221 · 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 teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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