Literary notes about revenant (AI summary)
In literature, the word revenant is employed in a range of nuanced ways, often carrying both literal and metaphorical meanings. At times it is used to denote an actual ghost or spectral apparition, as when it immediately conjures the unsettling presence of a dead soul returning to haunt the living [1, 2]. In other texts, it functions more symbolically to evoke the lingering impact of the past—a person or idea resurrected in the present to stir memories of former eras or to highlight a social or political commentary [3, 4, 5]. Additionally, its versatility is apparent in creative works where it serves as an evocative descriptor in both fantastical, suspenseful narratives and in pointed cultural critiques, blurring the line between the supernatural and the metaphorical [6, 7].
- I had the belief, derived from several writers, that Hinthial in Etruscan meant simply a ghost or revenant —the apparition of some one dead.
— from Legends of Florence: Collected from the People, First Series by Charles Godfrey Leland - It was as though a ghost, a revenant, had appeared.
— from Charles Baudelaire, His Life by Charles Baudelaire - Gina Ekdal, the wholesome, sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer—a revenant of Peer Gynt—has been called a feminine Sancho Panza.
— from Egoists, A Book of Supermen Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello by James Huneker - A revenant who lived one hundred years ago might pick up this volume and secure a fairly accurate idea of society to-day.
— from O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 - Burke was merely a ghost—a revenant from that far distant epoch.
— from The House of Dreams-Come-True by Margaret Pedler - REVENANT by Clark Ashton Smith I am the specter who returns Unto some desolate world in ruin borne afar
— from The Fantasy Fan, March, 1934The Fans' Own Magazine by Various - Le National, in its turn, interfered, and Le Revenant found itself confronted by three adversaries.
— from My Memoirs, Vol. VI, 1832 to 1833 by Alexandre Dumas
