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Literary notes about Collection (AI summary)

In literature, the term "collection" appears in a variety of contexts, symbolizing both concrete assemblies and abstract aggregates. Authors use it to refer to tangible groups—such as curated sets of books, artworks, artifacts, or even natural specimens [1], [2], [3]—and to more figurative groupings, like sets of ideas, texts, or experiences that together form a cohesive whole [4], [5], [6]. In some works it displays a sense of ongoing accumulation, as when a character’s assortment of memories or belongings is implied to be never fully "closed" [7], while in other texts it signifies a methodical canonization of knowledge, exemplified by historical, religious, or literary compilations [8], [9], [10]. Through these diverse uses, "collection" acts as a flexible literary device that can denote both deliberate organization and the serendipitous convergence of elements into an entity greater than its parts.
  1. The glass cases containing the collection of butterflies were ranged in three long rows upon slender-legged little tables.
    — from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  2. Portrait in oils by Bastien Lepage; exhibited in the Salon, 1883; now included in the Pereira Collection.
    — from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo by Juliette Drouet and Louis Guimbaud
  3. The count took the gentlemen into his study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes.
    — from War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy
  4. The first collection, or canon, of the New Testament was prepared by the Synod or Council of Laodicea in the fourth century ( a.d. 360).
    — from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  5. A Collection of Sagas and other Historical Documents relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen on the British Isles.
    — from The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga); with Excerpts from the Poetic Edda
  6. First, apparently, in the collection stood the "Hymn to Dionysus", of which only two fragments now survive.
    — from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica by Hesiod
  7. “I trust that you don't consider your collection closed.”
    — from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  8. The fourth collection, the Atharva-veda , attained to this position only after a long struggle.
    — from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell
  9. “The world is a collection of things embraced by the heaven, containing the stars, the earth, and all visible objects.
    — from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
  10. In 1557 appeared probably the first printed collection of miscellaneous English poems, known as Tottel's Miscellany .
    — from English Literature by William J. Long

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