Literary notes about Interim (AI summary)
The term "interim" has been widely employed in literature to denote a temporary period or provisional state between two phases. In narratives, it often signals a pause or transition, as illustrated by Sherlock Holmes’s temporary shelving of a problem until new answers arrive ([1]), while authors such as Poe and Hardy use it to evoke a sense of fleeting or in-between moments ([2], [3]). Beyond serving as a temporal marker, "interim" appears in contexts that assign temporary roles or statuses—for example, the appointment of an interim mayor during political upheavals in Carlyle’s work ([4]) and even to describe provisional states in more technical or legal texts ([5], [6]). Throughout various genres, from historical chronicles and political treatises to narrative fiction, the word underscores a period of waiting, transformation, or temporary arrangement, encapsulating the notion that some conditions are not permanent but merely transitional until final arrangements or revelations are made ([7], [8], [9]).
- And now, Doctor, we can do nothing until the answers to those letters come, so we may put our little problem upon the shelf for the interim.”
— from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - If I went to sleep as I proposed, how could the atmosphere in the chamber be regenerated in the interim?
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe - When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from her mother's triumphant manner that something had occurred in the interim.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy - We appoint one Fleuriot-Lescot Interim-Mayor in his stead: an 'architect from Belgium,' they say, this Fleuriot; he is a man one can depend on.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle - There will be a big interim.
— from Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting - Thirty years ago we did not have knowledge which has been gained by the experimenters in the nut growing industry in the interim.
— from Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting - I hope you have no repugnance to accept me as your guardian in the interim.”
— from Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - I will read by-and-by, say I to myself, or to-morrow, or when I please; and in the interim, time steals away without any inconvenience.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne - ‘Because I happened, in the interim, to learn all you would have told me—and a trifle more, I imagine.’
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
