A new form for a new crisis: the emergence of the novel-essay and the case of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) apparently defies categorisation. Although set in Antonine Rome, it is full of modern references, and though it traces the development of a single character, it is not a Bildungsroman. This essay interprets the novel as a hybrid genre, the “novel- essay”, which surfaced in the late 19th century. Following Stefano Ercolino, I argue that the novel- essay emerged as an aesthetic response “to the increasing pressure of historical time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (...) an epoch in which one witnessed not only the greatest economic expansion and cultural development of the modern era, but also the first huge modern economic crisis” (Ercolino 2014, xvii). The novel-essay challenges the equation between scientific and technological advancement, on the one side, and spiritual human progress on the other and, unlike Victorian novels with linear plots, it disrupts narrative flow with essayistic digressions that offer ideological critique, what Ercolino calls a “morphological exorcism of the pressure of historical time” (41). I contend that Pater’s novel exemplifies this form. As Giles Whiteley notes, Pater “invites his readers to see Marius through a double lens, both as a historical novel and as one commenting on contemporary concerns” (Whiteley 2020, 159), which I interpret as linked to the faltering of philosophical certainties during the turn of the century. My objective is to shed a light on Pater’s work as a novelist, examine his role in the disruption of literary conventions and trace this disruption back to the process of progressive technological and scientific acceleration that characterised the long fin de siècle.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".