Literary notes about miscreant (AI summary)
The term “miscreant” in literature is typically employed as a sharply pejorative label for those who transgress moral or legal boundaries, often functioning as a synonym for villain or ne’er-do-well. Writers deploy it to evoke a sense of disdain or to heighten dramatic tension, whether describing a cunning antagonist in adventure narratives [1, 2] or denouncing a character’s dreadful moral corruption [3, 4]. In some works, the term is even used in exclamatory or condemnatory dialogue to underscore a character’s unsavory nature, as seen in the spirited rebukes of Shakespearean verse [5, 6]. Its evolution—from an original sense of “misbeliever” [7] to a broader indictment of wickedness—demonstrates its enduring power as a literary tool for moral judgment.
- I told you to take that loping miscreant under the line of white point; now, if your bullet went a hair's breadth it went two inches above it.
— from The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper - And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach.
— from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson - The under world holds in rigorous bondage every unfortunate or miscreant who has once ‘served time.’
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis - In both these cases the public becomes a prey to every miscreant, who can tamper successfully with the follies either of age or infancy.
— from Common Sense by Thomas Paine - Well, miscreant, I'll be there as soon as you;
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - Curse, miscreant, when thou comest to the stake.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - 1The word miscreant, which originally meant simply misbeliever, has now quite another meaning (949).
— from Roget's Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget
