Literary notes about Predilection (AI summary)
In literature, “predilection” is often used to denote an inherent or cultivated bias—a subtle indicator of a character’s or narrator’s favored inclinations that enriches their portrayal. Writers employ the term to reveal an individual's particular taste or habitual leaning, whether it be towards an art form or a way of life, thereby adding layers of complexity to the narrative [1, 2]. It can underscore everything from a simple, personal affinity for specific subjects to revealing ideological or cultural predispositions that guide decision-making and moral judgment [3, 4]. In many texts, this seemingly innocuous word provides a window into deeper, often contradictory impulses, allowing readers to glimpse the undercurrent of preferences that shape characters’ internal worlds and public actions [5, 6].
- He left her to the companionship of Mark Jeringham, while he indulged in his predilection for literary work.
— from The Third Volume by Fergus Hume - He was educated at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute and at once showed a predilection for scientific work.
— from Inventors by Philip Gengembre Hubert - Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - “He used to have a predilection for Bacchus.”
— from War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy - “Turgenev’s novels: civic responsibility and literary predilection,” Harvard Slavic studies iv (1957) 249–262 565 Edmund Wilson.
— from Turgenev in English: A Checklist of Works by and about Him by David H. Stam - There is also something else common to them: a predilection to resist intellectual Germanizing—and a still greater inability to do so!
— from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
