Lyric historiography in Canadian modernist poetry, 1962-1981
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on five closely knit writers who, between 1962 and 1981, produced exemplary historiographic poetry that guided their contemporaries. Al Purdy, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, and Margaret Atwood were the chief voices of a literary mode that I term "modernist lyric historiography": a meditative modernist lyric that is self-critical, self-consciously incapable of claiming and skeptical about any claim to authority over history, and fundamentally historiographic (in the sense that it synthesizes, discards, and/or critically evaluates fragments of history). Arguably, Purdy was the inaugurator of lyric historiography: in the early 1960s, he experimented with a modernist lyric attentive to a broad vision of Canadian history. Newlove was one of many poets who saw Purdy's lyric historiography as a mode that could be used to provide insight into neglected prairie histories. As part of their search for more intimate connections to history that could sustain longer, narrative poems, McKinnon and Suknaski adapted lyric historiography to explore the familial past. Atwood reimagined lyric historiography as the search for Canadian "foremothers," proto-feminists that could serve as models for the second-wave feminist movement.Addressing the archives, creative writing, and historical contexts of these five writers, this dissertation proposes two primary claims. First, modernism persisted well into the 1970s (and even beyond) and shared with Canadian postmodernism a sophisticated approach to the idea of "history." Second, modernist lyric historiography was a continued investigation into one's ability to claim authority over historical narratives. Many modernists found some measure of such authority by exploring the most intimate connections to the past, which tended to be literal and figurative familial ones.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".