Literary notes about CLIMAX (AI summary)
In literature the term "climax" is most often deployed to signal the peak moment—the point at which tension, conflict, or emotion is fully realized and from which the narrative pivots. It can denote a turning point or the highest intensity of a performance, as when dramatic passions surge and then resolve in a burst of action or despair [1, 2, 3]. Authors sometimes play with the term by contrasting buildup with a deliberate letdown or anti-climax to subvert expectations and add ironic commentary [4, 5, 6]. At other times, "climax" serves a descriptive function, marking not only an emotional zenith in character development or plot structure but also a literal peak in sequences of action, history, or even natural progression [7, 8, 9].
- In Dostoyevsky, indeed, the passion for the common people and the all-embracing, all-penetrating pity for suffering humanity reach their climax.
— from Best Russian Short Stories - The climax came last night, when, owing to my entering her room by accident, she jumped out of window—so strong was her dread of me!
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy - The child’s terror had reached its climax.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)—"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 'Pardon me,' returns Lightwood, 'I must postpone the reply for one moment, or we shall have an anti-climax.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens - This is all very well in farce, but such anti-climax becomes painful when the speaker falls from the sublime to the ridiculous quite unintentionally.
— from The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein - On July 26th, I returned to Climax and the grafts were successful, as you can see by the following series.
— from Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting - The Swedish immigration received a new impulse in 1852; it was five thousand in 1868; it reached its climax of 64,607 in 1882.
— from A History of Norwegian Immigration to the United States by George T. Flom - In such cases the composer should be careful as to the arrangement of the final chord, the summit and climax of the passage.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson
