Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation constitutes the first sustained examination of the relationship between eating and the nineteenth-century British novel as a form. My central argument concerns how the novel's key imaginative constructs—the bourgeois individual and the marriage plot—achieve their coherence by delimiting the materiality of eating. Through readings of texts by Jane Austen, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, I trace how the constructs of the individual and the marriage plot, over the course of the nineteenth century, become less stable as eating breaks out of its conventional symbolic role and gains material and narrative force. I call this force "the food plot," and show how it emerges in direct competition with the marriage plot, that nineteenth-century hallmark of both narrative closure and reproductive futurity. Taking Austen as a point of departure, Chapter One analyzes how her novels subordinate eating to the marriage plot by conspicuously rendering those who show interest in the former as psychologically flat, and by relegating the preoccupation with eating to marginal, impoverished and working-class figures, or middle-class figures of pre-, post-, or failed reproductive genital sexuality (i.e. children, bachelors, spinsters, widows). Examining the work of Thackeray, Gaskell and Dickens in the Victorian period, Chapters Two and Three trace the resurgence of these figures in increasingly forceful food plots, plots that now invade and distort the marriage plot in peculiar ways. Finally, in Chapter Four, I look at novels by Wells and Stoker to examine how the weakening marriage plot at the fin de siècle often gave way to dominant food plots—particularly those of the predatory or cannibalistic variety that threatened to replace the individual's consolidation in wedlock with a literal breaching at the teeth of monstrosities.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.004 |
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".