'The Poet and Publisher at Variance!': Comic Representations of Literary Professionals in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the fictionalization of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, which is consistently presented through the lens of comedy in the imaginative literature of the period. Illuminating the surprising degree of variation among representations of literary professionals in conversation, my analysis of texts like Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker underlines how seemingly programmatic scenes of the author-character’s oppression by the bookseller-character are complicated and subverted by comedy. I posit that readers are encouraged to construct a paradigm of Literary Professionalism against the unprofessionalism—as well as glimpses of professionalism—among the characters involved in the "literary" literary marketplace. Both the conflict and concord among characters accentuate a set of professional standards graspable to individual readers sensitive to the nuances of comedy and power in these negotiations. A lively and persuasive argument for print is ultimately made through the interactive nature of the comedy in these works. The first chapter examines the conditions of eighteenth-century literary marketplace, surveying developments in professional writing and publishing. I also present an overview of the period’s debate about commercial authorship and introduce the literary stereotypes of the author and the bookseller. In the middle chapters of the dissertation I use outcome power, the ability to affect outcomes, to group and separate the fictional dialogues between literary professionals that appear in eighteenth-century fiction and drama. The final chapter is a focused reading of The Adventures of an Author, which contains multiple representations of literary professionals in different kinds of narrative encounters.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".