Literary notes about Perversion (AI summary)
In literature the term "perversion" is frequently deployed to denote a distortion or deviation from an ideal, natural, or intended state. Authors have used it to criticize shifts in ideas, institutions, and even objects—from the deliberate manipulation of texts ([1]), political and social structures ([2], [3]), and historical narratives ([4], [5]), to the corruption of human nature, whether in the realm of sexuality ([6], [7]) or artistic expression ([8], [9]). In philosophical and psychoanalytic contexts, "perversion" often marks a departure from reason or innate goodness, suggesting that pure principles or natural processes have been contorted into something undesirable ([10], [11], [12]). This varied usage underscores the word’s power to critique any deviation that many authors consider a corruption of both truth and inherent virtue.
- But this perversion has been wrought on many texts.
— from The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors; Or, Christianity Before Christ by Kersey Graves - For a time we inveighed against this and sought to consider it a perversion of the only possible method of practical democracy.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois - I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens - It is a pure perversion of history to apply latter-day codes of morality to the heroes of bygone ages.
— from The Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane-Poole - Now, this is assuredly a willful and unworthy perversion of the truth.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - I do not even object to making the relation between child-sexuality and sexual perversion quite obvious to you.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud - No, you have merely forgotten that it was my intention to present to you infantile sexuality in connection with the facts of sexual perversion.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud - But then it was a peculiar doll,—a frightful perversion of wax and sawdust,—a doll fearfully and wonderfully made,—a smaller edition of M'liss.
— from The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales by Bret Harte - I saw in this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - "Egoism" and "altruism" are both one-sided qualities arising out of the perversion of man's, "natural goodness.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - There is no more dangerous error than to confound the effect with the cause: I call this error the intrinsic perversion of reason.
— from The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist by Nietzsche - Regression of the libido without suppression would never result in neurosis but would finally end in perversion.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
