Literary notes about familiar (AI summary)
In literature, the term familiar is deployed with versatile nuances, ranging from denoting a well-known or regularly encountered aspect to evoking a sense of intimacy and nostalgia. Authors use it to signal both shared cultural knowledge, as when referring to common literary or historical allusions ([1], [2]), and personal recognition of places, objects, or customs that comfort or unsettle the reader ([3], [4]). At times, the word underscores habitual elements in conversation or memory ([5], [6]), while in other cases it differentiates between what is known and what remains unknown or evocative of past encounters ([7], [8]). The layered use of familiar enables writers to deepen characterization and world-building by conjuring ideas that are at once ordinary and deeply resonant ([9], [10]).
- “No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” said Edmund, “from one's earliest years.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - That it was only too familiar to the Romans is shown by their many references to it: Catullus, Martial, the apostle Paul, Tertullian, and others.
— from The Satyricon — Complete by Petronius Arbiter - Her mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the townspeople.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - he thought with his hand on the bell, but he rang all the same, and went up the familiar staircase.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the matter I will state that the consonants are pronounced as follows: g always as in get.
— from The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines by T. H. Pardo de Tavera - It wakes Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens - I passed through scenes familiar to my youth, but which I had not seen for nearly six years.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - There, once more appeared the form most familiar.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë - This was, in fact, a custom familiar to him.
— from Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - I had known many of the grown people before and almost all the children, but now the very steeple began to wear a familiar and affectionate look.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens
