The anxiety of feminist influence : concepts of voice in Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the concepts of “voice” and “influence” through the case studies of two famous English-speaking Canadian women writers, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. The “voice” is multiple, ambiguous and influenced, but it is also apparently unique. How, therefore, is it constructed and where does it come from? I examine, work with and adapt Harold Bloom’s paradigmatic study of influence to a feminist context, exploring the idea that a literary voice can be developed and influenced by Atwood and Shields. I discuss how these writers searched for an appropriate literary role model, exemplified by nineteenth-century English-Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, at the moment when Canadian nationalism and feminism coincided. Atwood and Shields are now canonical writers themselves and important in both the nationalist and women’s tradition, but have they gone on to influence new Canadian women writers? I test the pleasures and the anxieties of Shields’ influence with regard to her creative writing students and her own daughter, Anne Giardini, who has published her first novel. I compare Shields with Atwood, who has achieved a high level of fame, and examine what kind of influence each exerts. I discuss whether literary influence is politically different for women than men and whether there is any jealousy or power struggles between the sexes. Rivalry and competition between writers are not purely caused by the aesthetic issues that Bloom discusses, therefore I contextualise his concept of influence using literary celebrity studies to consider the economic basis of cultural production. This is in order to show that tensions are determined by market conditions, just as much as the new poet’s desire to overthrow a literary precursor. Finally, I examine fan letters to Atwood and Shields as another important source of literary influence. I discuss how fans are constructed through a commercial relationship and how they can also provide an amateur literary voice. Atwood and Shields have helped to create a network of writers across the globe. I explore whether both authors can be role models who will inspire the next literary generation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".