Literary notes about perverted (AI summary)
In literature, "perverted" is employed as a powerful term to denote the corruption or twisting of what is natural, pure, or good. It is often used to describe how originally noble qualities or rational faculties become distorted—be it in the warping of beauty and grace into something grotesque ([1], [2]), the debasement of youthful charm by crude influences ([3]), or the alteration of sound judgment and doctrine into error and injustice ([4], [5], [6]). Authors extend the term to cover a wide range of misappropriations, from the manipulation of intellectual or moral principles ([7], [8]) to the general inversion of societal ideals and aesthetics ([9], [10]), thereby underscoring a theme of decline and degeneration that challenges the natural order.
- Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty.
— from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson - I am only sad that a charming nature such as yours should be perverted by all this crude nonsense before you have begun life.”
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Did Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused and perverted Othello's mind has become?
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley - The expression would gain force, if we might suppose that the heretical teachers obscured or perverted the doctrine of the resurrection (comp.
— from St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon by J. B. Lightfoot - Jarndyce and Jarndyce has warped him out of himself and perverted me in his eyes.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens - The pupil's faculties are perverted by the indiscretion of the master.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - Thus man with a perverted skill, [30] In his own darkness blind, The mystic coil of Fate and Will Seeks madly to unbind.
— from A Century of Emblems by George Spencer Cautley - And our glorious Revolution is subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron, perverted to do it, cries another!
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle - If they suffer this power of arbitrary incapacitation to stand, they have utterly perverted every other power of the House of Commons.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke
