"Sinful Creature, Full of Weakness": The Theology of Disability in Cummins's <em>The Lamplighter</em> [Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After several decades of scholarship that discerned general patterns in literary representations of disability, recent years have seen a turn toward the specific and the particular, with a focused concentration on the ways in which individual texts and literary moments limn bodily difference. In a recent essay about disability in the early American novel, Sari Altschuler made a compelling case for this transition by showing that some of the standard claims about literary representations of disability simply failed to apply to the specific nature of early American fiction, and she consequently called for more particularized, historically grounded analyses of literary depictions of disability. Maria Susanna Cummins’s best-selling sentimental novel, The Lamplighter (1854), offers an important contribution to this endeavor because in numerous ways it starkly diverges from both standard literary treatments of disability and some of the precepts of disability studies. For instance, in its depiction of the maturation and socialization of the street urchin Gertrude Flint, The Lamplighter does not portray the atypical body as unusual or exceptional. Instead, Cummins’s novel includes a wide array of disabled characters, and she depicts impairment as a commonplace and even inevitable occurrence: men and women, adults and children, the working classes and the elite all experience the fragility of the body, and all transition from independence to a state of dependence, reliant on the care of others for their survival. Though scholars have noted that that disability is typically shunted to the margins of literature and even rendered invisible, disability is at the very fore of The Lamplighter, with caregiving an active subject of discussion and concern.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".