Literary notes about abdication (AI summary)
Literary works employ the term "abdication" to capture moments when authority, responsibility, or even moral resolve is relinquished. In some texts, it denotes a formal transfer of power, as seen when monarchs or emperors step down in historical narratives [1, 2, 3]. In other contexts, it functions more metaphorically to underscore a character’s personal or ideological surrender—a retreat from duty or a voluntary renunciation of one’s inner will [4, 5, 6]. At times, the word appears to mark pivotal transitions in both public life and private affairs, encapsulating a profound break from the past that ushers in a new era of change [7, 8, 9].
- Thus, according to Bede's reckoning, he reigned from 688 to 725, but the date of his abdication is variously given.
— from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England by Saint the Venerable Bede - The abdication of Valens is the first article of the treaty."
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - He was the son of King Milan, and on the abdication of his father in 1889 was proclaimed king under a regency.
— from The New Gresham Encyclopedia. A to Amide by Various - Happiness seems to the German moralists something unheroic, an abdication before external things, a victory of the senses over the will.
— from Egotism in German Philosophy by George Santayana - And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism—two different forms of the same self-abdication."
— from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - [Pg 12] Result: moral valuations are condemnations, negations; morality is the abdication of the will to live....
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II by Nietzsche - I say the loss or abdication of one set, in the future, will be ruin to democracy just as much as the loss of the other set.
— from Complete Prose Works by Walt Whitman - It is upon this principle that the right of abdication may possibly be founded.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - At the end of this Note the President hinted more openly than in that of October 14 at the abdication of the Kaiser.
— from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes
