The Best Literary “Figures” in History 1 Colette 2 Neal Cassady 3 Mary Shelley 4 Colson Whitehead 5 J.K. Rowling 6 Ernest Hemingway 7 Sylvia Plath 8 Sebastian Junger 9 Jane Austen 10 Haruki Murakami More items...
Literary figures, tropes or rhetorical figures, are a series of language turns that are used to beautify speech , especially in the context of oratory and literature , significantly altering the common and everyday way of using language.
Writers are often told to write what they know, so it should come as no surprise that many of the most famous characters in literary history are based on real people.
There are a plethora of attractive and well-formed writers, both in history and today, that completely demolish such stereotypes, and whose likenesses we’ve collected here.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman lawyer, writer, and orator. He is famous for his orations on politics and society, as well as serving as a high-ranking consul.
Who was Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a republic to an empire, grabbing power through ambitious political reforms. Julius Caesar was famous not only for his military and political successes, but also for his steamy relationship with Cleopatra.
Cicero was a Roman orator, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher. During a time of political corruption and violence, he wrote on what he believed to be the ideal form of government.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman orator, statesman, and writer. He was born on 6 January 106 BCE at either Arpinum or Sora, 70 miles south-east of Rome, in the Volscian mountains. His father was an affluent eques, and the family was distantly related to Gaius Marius.
Augustus reorganized Roman life throughout the empire. He passed laws to encourage marital stability and renew religious practices. He instituted a system of taxation and a census while also expanding the network of Roman roads.
Julius Caesar Julius Caesar is arguably the most well known of the ancient Romans. Even though most people may not have the slightest idea when it comes to ancient Rome, chances are that they will still have heard of the prodigious Roman emperor (and self-appointed dictator) Julius Caesar.
Cicero. A Roman senator renowned for his oratorical skill. Cicero speaks at Caesar's triumphal parade. He later dies at the order of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture....CiceroCause of deathBeheaded by order of Mark AntonyOccupationStatesman, lawyer, writer, orator19 more rows
Cicero is an acclaimed Roman statesman and orator who makes a speech in Greek during the festivities in Act 1, baffling Casca and other hearers.
Quintilian100 AD) was a Roman educator and rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing....QuintilianQuintilian's statue in Calahorra, La Rioja, SpainBornc. 35 Calagurris, Hispania, Roman EmpireDiedc. 100Academic background10 more rows
Cicero was one of the most prolific Roman writers, and the number of his speeches, letters and treatises that have survived into the modern era is a testament to his admiration by successive generations.
Cicero is a minor but by no means negligible figure in the history of Latin poetry. His best-known poems (which survive only in fragments) were the epics De consulatu suo (On His Consulship) and De temporibus suis (On His Life and Times), which were criticized in antiquity for their self-praise.
The metaphor is done directly, replacing terms; the simile indirectly, with a comparative nexus: “like”, “like”, etc. H ipérbole . It is an exaggeration for expressive purposes: to emphasize or minimize a particular feature of something. M etonymy .
What are literary figures? Literary figures, tropes or rhetorical figures, are a series of language turns that are used to beautify speech , especially in the context of oratory and literature , significantly altering the common and everyday way of using language . They are usually used for aesthetic or persuasive purposes, ...
They go together because they are comparisons: two terms are directly or indirectly collated to highlight some quality between them, whether by similarity, difference, figurative sense, etc.
It consists of the joint use of two terms or descriptions whose meanings contradict each other. Ellipsis . It occurs when some term of the sentence or sentence is omitted, either for the purpose of generating suspense or because it has become clear from previous sentences and it would be redundant to repeat it.
They are usually used for aesthetic or persuasive purposes, as part of an elaborate discourse , and they emphasize the poetic function of language : the one that focuses on how to convey the message above all else. They can also be found in colloquial language, as a creative or playful twist.
A member of Oscar Wilde’s lively literary circle, John Gray was a lovely, boyish poet who could pass for a 15-year-old at age 25. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde describes the youth as a “young Adonis,” and judging by a black-and-white photo of John Gray, we can only suggest that he was not far off.
Prospero writes the script and wonders, like Shakespeare understandably would, what the future will be without him and his power. With frequent allusions to “the Globe” (the world, but also the name of Shakespeare’s theater), it is difficult to miss Prospero’s likeness to his great creator.
The similarities between Gray the character and Gray the poet were striking. Like Dorian, John Gray found himself easily corrupted by the city and the title character’s first name came from an ancient Greek tribe, the Dorians, who were famous for perpetuating love among men.
The story is based on a young girl who, in Faulkner’s words, “just wanted to be loved and to love and to have a husband and a family.”. Besides these aspirations, however, Miss Emily took after Miss Maud in an even more compelling way: As an artist.
Shakespeare critic and scholar Stephen Greenblatt says that the play brings up all of the “issues that haunted Shakespeare’s imagination throughout his career.”. By writing himself into his final play, Shakespeare reminded the world of his own immortality as a public literary figure. 2.
Like her narrator in My Ántonia, Jim Burden, Willa Cather was born in Virginia. Then, like Jim Burden, at age 9 she moved with her family to the untamed plains of Red Cloud, Nebraska. In Red Cloud, Cather became friends with Annie Pavelka, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants recently transplanted there.
Capote, who lived next door to Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, and was her best childhood friend, first put Lee into two of his own novels before becoming the inspiration for Dill Harris, Scout’s precocious, wise-beyond-his-years best friend and neighbor.