Literary notes about upstart (AI summary)
The term "upstart" in literature has often been employed as a disparaging label for those who have unexpectedly risen above their traditional station. Authors use it to denote individuals perceived as lacking the legitimate pedigree or nobility of established classes, as seen when characters are dismissed as mere tools or peasant interlopers in the societal order ([1], [2], [3]). In works ranging from political treatises to novels, the word highlights the resentment of traditional elites who view such newcomers with scorn—whether in the context of heroic revolutions, as in [4] and [5], or as figures of quiet derision in everyday social interactions ([6], [7]). Even when used somewhat playfully or in epistolary form ([8]), "upstart" consistently conveys the tension between old-established authority and the disruptive ambition of those who dare to rise beyond it ([9], [10], [11], [12]).
- He is an upstart, a man of no name, who will only be the tool of a party in France.
— from Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - “Not a bit!” interrupted Bucket, “for he is an upstart that rose from being a petty landholder.
— from Pan Tadeusz; or, The last foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz - What would a lord say—yes, or any other person of whatever condition—if he caught an upstart peasant with a dagger on his person?”
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain - Kings will despise you as an upstart, subjects will hate you as an usurper, and your equals will denounce you as a tyrant.
— from Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796-1812 by Emperor of the French Napoleon I - In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart.
— from The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx - The newspapers laughed the wretched upstart and swindler to scorn.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray - A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo , and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery.
— from Emma by Jane Austen - My Dear Mrs. Upstart: Thank you for the very handsome candlesticks you sent us.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post - An upstart and a junker , like so many others!
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - Consider, brother, that ours is no upstart family; but is as ancient as the best in the kingdom!
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson - Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot - Donald Farfrae—that treacherous upstart—that she had thus humiliated herself.
— from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy