"Wandering like a Lost and Starving Dog": Representations of Human and Nonhuman Animal Straying in Victorian Literature and Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation argues that the stray dog is an important figure of itinerancy and inscrutability in the Victorian novel. While literary "pets" are frequently read as figures of sympathy, stray animals have a more unfixed narrative purchase. Their novelistic presence is characterized by brevity, uncertainty, and disruption. When Victorian writers represent stray dogs or liken human characters to stray dogs, they are invoking interpretive instability outside orienting strictures of domesticity, affiliation and ownership, and predictable intention. In moving literary animals beyond the productive but ultimately restrictive lens of sympathy, this dissertation offers a unique insight into an important and highly visible animal presence that has gone largely unacknowledged and certainly underexplored in both the burgeoning field of Victorian animal studies and studies of the Victorian novel more broadly. The readings in this dissertation "stray" among numerous genres and archival sources. These sources-- lost dog notices, periodical accounts of the first homeless animal shelter, rabies control pamphlets and editorials, lost animal autobiographies--are read alongside and against canonical novels such as Charlotte Brontë's
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".