"The circumscribed geography of home": Island identity in the fiction of Alistair MacLeod and Wayne Johnston
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis addresses issues of islandness and island identity in the fiction of Cape Breton's\nAlistair MacLeod and Newfoundland's Wayne Johnston. Through careful readings of their\nfiction, with supplementary evidence culled from biographical and secondary sources, the thesis\nshows that their work is profoundly influenced by their childhood experiences; that these authors\nhave been "imprinted" by growing up on an island; and that, as a result, both authors bear a\nstrong island identity which inspires and infuses their writings. The thesis opens by introducing\nthemes that pervade islandness, and proceeds to set MacLeod's and Johnston's fiction in the\ncontext of the western traditions of island and regionalist literature, followed by a discussion of\nhow identity is formulated. In three chapters the thesis explores the theme of boundedness:\nphysically or geographically, in the ways that the ocean's boundary defines a character, as\nevidenced primarily in Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and MacLeod’s "Island";\npsychologically, in the ways that childhood and family affect an individual growing up on an\nisland, as evidenced primarily in Johnston's The Story of Bobby O’Malley and MacLeod’s "The\nBoat" and "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood"; and emotionally, in the ways that social influences\naffect feelings of belonging and exile, as evidenced primarily in Johnston’s The Custodian of\nParadise and MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. The thesis concludes with a reaffirmation of the\ninfluence of islandness and island identity in the fiction of Alistair MacLeod and Wayne\nJohnston.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".