Taxidermy and the Gothic the horror of still life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic's collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts. Like late Victorian Walter Potter's infamous taxidermied two-headed kitten, the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy's uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts is a driving force in generating fear. The core argument of the book is that taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being-there. Taxidermy often sits, presiding over characters in critical moments in Gothic texts, sometimes foreshadowing their own fate, but most frequently taxidermy works to amplify the affect of horror, generating anxiety over what will be forever preserved and never escaped: the violence of life
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".