Bibliographic record
Abstract
In tandem with the coming-of-age of children's literature itself, this dissertation explores the growth of the boy's quest-romance, a sub-genre of nineteenth-century boy's adventure literature. Like Franco Moretti, who observes that literary forms evolve according to the "pressure of cultural selection," I posit an evolutionary model of the boy's quest, focusing on the work of George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, R.L. Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling as forming a hypothetical branching of this model (Graphs, Maps, Trees 72). By framing close-readings of primary texts within the historical and literary cultural climate of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, I trace how the boy's quest evolves in response to popular tastes: first by disengaging itself from its Evangelical roots, and later by initiating a modernist experimentation with the linear quest structure. While Jacqueline Rose argues that children's writing resists such experimentation, my study challenges this view by demonstrating that children's literature does not simply reflect cultural change but also pioneers this change with its capacity for generic innovation. Focusing on the intersection between gender and genre in these texts, I begin by exploring this model of the boy's quest in MacDonald's Princess books (1872, 82) in order to test its gendered restrictions; by shifting his focus from Irene's search for identity to that of her male companion Curdie, MacDonald reinforces the connective thread between masculinity and quest-romance that my dissertation outlines. I next explore Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), in which the male narrator's emphasis on physical courage or "pluck" distances Kingsley's work from that of his Evangelical contemporaries and establishes an important precedent for Stevenson's "a-moral" romances. By highlighting David's ability to manipulate his own representation as a storyteller, I aim both to overturn the caricature of "poor Davie" common in criticism of Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893), and to suggest that Stevenson is introducing metafiction to the quest-romance, a trend that Kipling continues in the Mowgli stories (1893-5) and Kim (1901). In attempting to evade his protagonists' adult roles as imperial agents, Kipling dismantles the linear quest in favour of perpetual childhood, establishing an important precedent for J.M. Barrie into the early twentieth century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".