Literary notes about Representative (AI summary)
In literature, “representative” is deployed in a variety of contexts to denote a person or thing that embodies or stands for a wider group or idea. Political texts use it to describe officials who are chosen to express the will and interests of the people ([1],[2],[3],[4]), while other works employ it to evoke an archetypal figure—one that symbolizes the typical qualities or virtues of an era or community ([5],[6],[7]). The term also carries a metaphorical weight, functioning as a stand-in for broader cultural, mythological, or natural principles, whether in linking historical legacies to contemporary realities ([8],[9]) or in illustrating the connection between an individual and the universal ([10],[11]).
- Compared with simple monarchy, representative government is in these respects at no disadvantage.
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill - In the third place, those ties which bind the representative to his constituents are strengthened by motives of a more selfish nature.
— from The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison - Chapter XIV—Of the Executive in a Representative Government.
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill - Representative assemblies are often taunted by their enemies with being places of mere talk and bavardage .
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill - He is a Representative American man—a type of his countrymen.
— from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass - A most edifying representative I shall make of all the domestic virtues—don’t you think so?
— from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - He is a man of progress and enterprise—a representative man of the age.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain - They were borne on the stream of mythologic evolution to representative regions very different from any they could have contemplated.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway - Of the Senate of the United States!” Mr. Noble—“Then I am become the acknowledged representative of a nation.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - You are the representative of justice here, and it is for justice to avenge those she has been unable to protect.’
— from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet
