Literary notes about Disunion (AI summary)
The term "disunion" appears in literature with a range of meanings, from the physical and political separation of forces to metaphorical rifts in thought and connection. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ([1], [2]), the word underscores themes of alienation and internal conflict among characters, mirroring the fragmented nature of relationships and society. Thomas Jefferson ([3]) employs it in a political context, denoting a state of deliberate separation that challenges unity, while James Joyce ([4]) uses it in a playful, almost paradoxical manner to evoke sensations of both division and convergence. Other authors—from Sherman ([5]) and Whitman ([6]) to Santayana ([7]), Burke ([8]), Cicero ([9]), and Carlyle ([10])—have harnessed disunion to explore conflicts ranging from personal discord to sweeping historical and ideological separations, highlighting its versatility as a literary device.
- I need not say that we were strangers to any species of disunion or dispute.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - I need not say that we were strangers to any species of disunion or dispute.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - [136] But King disapproved disunion.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?
— from Ulysses by James Joyce - None dare admit a friendship for us, though they say freely that they were at the outset opposed to war and disunion.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. Sherman - Out of those generic influences, mainly in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, &c., arose the attempt at disunion.
— from Complete Prose Works by Walt Whitman - In this way the unity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - It is a serious affair, this studied disunion in government.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke - For every vice of the mind does not imply a disunion of parts; as is the case with those who are not far from being wise men.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero - Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation; which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
