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Record W4409313503 · doi:10.3138/ecf.2023-0054

What Is Eighteenth-Century <i>Xiaoshuo</i>?

2025· article· en· W4409313503 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Jessica Dvorak Moyer

Bibliographic record

VenueEighteenth-Century Fiction · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicChinese history and philosophy
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article responds to the question, “What is eighteenth-century fiction?” with a focus on Chinese fiction. It begins with an overview of eighteenth-century Chinese fiction and a deeper reading of the explicit metafictionality of China’s most famous eighteenth-century novel, Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber). Then it critically interrogates the assumed equivalency between the English term fiction and the Chinese term xiaoshuo through a historical overview of the unequal literary and linguistic engagements between Europe and China. The article concludes that “we can neither reduce Stone to fiction nor deny it the status of fiction” and calls for a way of reading Chinese literary works in translation without essentializing either sameness or difference, one that acknowledges the dangers and distinctions involved yet insists on communicability across differences—one based first in the pleasure of reading for its own sake.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.014
Threshold uncertainty score0.031

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.008
Scholarly communication0.0030.003
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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 head0.014
GPT teacher head0.280
Teacher spread0.266 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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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