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Record W7135054656 · doi:10.1353/vcr.2025.a985005

George Eliot's Felix Holt and the "Mass Experience" of Energy

2025· article· en· W7135054656 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Corbin Hiday

Bibliographic record

VenueVictorian review · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEcocriticism and Environmental Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLiteral and figurative languageGeorge (robot)Relation (database)Energy (signal processing)HegemonyIndustrial RevolutionCapitalism

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract: Often read as a political or industrial novel, George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) appears as a peculiar historical novel when its incorporation of energy discourse is considered. The novel elucidates how the expansion of industrial development mediates what Georg Lukács refers to as the "mass experience of history" (25) as it coincides with a particular form of energy: fossil fuels. However, despite energy's functioning as a master concept related to productivity and calculability by 1866, readers encounter varying connotations of nineteenth-century energy discourse within the novel, understood across residual moral, spiritual, and dominant thermodynamic registers. Thus, the near-historical framework of the plot in the 1830s reminds readers that a thermodynamic and fossil capitalist understanding of energy derives from a much richer history of moral, political, and philosophical discourses. In other words, for Eliot, the figurative and literary dimensions of energy cannot be fully cast aside. The figurative dimensions of the energy concept appear variously in relation to characters—from Felix Holt to Harold Transome to Esther Lyon—and to the uncontrollable masses during the infamous riot scene. Ultimately, in the bifurcation between the 1830s and the 1860s, an attentiveness to the varying deployment of energy discourse in Felix Holt challenges a sense of inevitability associated with the rise of fossil capitalism. Eliot's novel not only meditates on the relation between novelistic protagonicity and the masses but also implies that the hegemony of a fossil economy was historically contingent.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.989
Threshold uncertainty score0.915

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.211
Teacher spread0.205 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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