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<i>An Ideal Husband</i>

2025· book-chapter· en· W4414431423 on OpenAlexaff
Gregory Mackie

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDecadence, Literature, and Society
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIdeal (ethics)Argument (complex analysis)FavouriteIdealismPlot (graphics)Affect (linguistics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Although literary history tends to hold up The Importance of Being Earnest as Oscar Wilde’s quintessential play, Wilde’s own favourite among his comedies was An Ideal Husband. Its original performance having been curtailed by the scandal surrounding the 1895 trials, An Ideal Husband appeared in print only in 1899. Painstakingly revised, it was also the last book Wilde published during his lifetime. As such, it affords a unique vantage for examining Wilde’s literary career and legacy. This chapter attends to the witty comedy’s entanglement with its author’s real-life tragedy, and argues that the play’s very structure, just as much as the emotional lives of its characters, is propelled by a palpable anxiety over the loss of social capital—and the cascading consequences of such a loss. By exploring the multiple facets of such dramatically generative anxiety, moreover, this chapter finds in that emotion the fuel for the play’s argument against idealism as a form of judgemental intolerance. In a play organized by the attachment of affect to information—to the guilt that travels with secrets—that argument finally locates itself in the transformation of Gertrude Chiltern’s Puritanism into something more humane, for it is only the possibility of being compromised that leads her to reassess her own narrow-mindedness. The stakes of this transformation become clear when the play is aligned with detective fiction in a comparison with Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Second Stain’, a Sherlock Holmes story whose plot bears surprising and illuminating similarities to Wilde’s play.

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)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.967
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.018
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.231 · 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
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

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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