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Conventionalism   Listen
noun
Conventionalism  n.  
1.
That which is received or established by convention or arbitrary agreement; that which is in accordance with the fashion, tradition, or usage. "All the artifice and conventionalism of life." "They gaze on all with dead, dim eyes, wrapped in conventionalisms,... simulating feelings according to a received standard."
2.
(Fine Arts) The principles or practice of conventionalizing. See Conventionalize, v. t.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Conventionalism" Quotes from Famous Books



... history of his mental evolution. His sympathy with the revolution was perfectly genuine, but involved a vast misconception. A sturdy, independent youth, thoroughly imbued with the instincts of his northern dalesmen, he had early leaned to a republican sentiment. His dislike of the effete conventionalism of the literary creed blended with his aversion to the political rule of the time. He caught the contagion of revolutionary enthusiasm in France, and was converted by the sight of the 'hunger-bitten' peasant girl—the victim of aristocratic oppression. 'It is against that,' said ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art. He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... The Egyptians and Singhalese were not, however, the only authorities who overwhelmed invention by ecclesiastical conventionalism. The early artists of Greece were not at liberty to follow the bent of their own genius, or to depart from established regulations in representing the figures of the gods. In the middle ages, the influence of the churches, both of Rome and Byzantium, was productive of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... even impart fascination to a bad style, as to that of Jean Paul. Such an author may therefore be very useful to a student who can withstand him, which poor Carlyle could not. There was a time, it is said, when English and American literature seemed to be expiring of conventionalism. Carlyle was the Jenner who inoculated and saved us all by this virus from Germany, and then died of his own disease. It now seems a privilege, perhaps, to be able to remember the time when all literature was in the inflammatory stage of this superinduced disorder; but does ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... nevertheless, he hesitated for a few minutes, thinking whether he should correct her manner of speech or not, and while loving chasten her. Finally, he decided that he would not. She was only his lover as yet: when she should be his wife it would then be time enough to teach her the subdued conventionalism of English feeling as interpreted by the English tongue used commonly by gentlemen and ladies. Meanwhile, he must give her her head, as he inwardly phrased it, so as not frighten her in the beginning and thus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... nude figures, Hesione and Hercules, and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. They retain traces of Celtic treatment, as in Hesione's hair. But the general treatment is Roman. The Late Celtic art is here sinking into the general conventionalism of ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... fame was long and hard; and his life was interrupted, like that of other men, by sickness and pain. In the stoop in his gait, in the lines in his face, you saw the man who had reached his Ithaca by no mere yachting over summer seas. And hence, no doubt, the utter absence in him of all that conventionalism which marks the man of quiet experience and habitual conformity to the world. In the streets, a stranger would have known Jerrold to be a remarkable man; you would have gone away speculating on him. In talk, he was still Jerrold;—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... due course:—a stop-gap from an obscure down-country station; a man of hide-bound conventionalism, who brought with him three children and a washed-out, subdued-looking wife, and who spoke magnanimously of Norton as "a clever fellow, of course, but deplorably casual officially." With such haphazard shifting of pawns on the chess-board is ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... and leaned for support on Bog's arm. He stood firm, erect, unblenching, with that instinct of physical strength which one feels when the woman that he loves hangs confidingly on his arm. Fayette Overtop, with his well-known dislike for conventionalism, was thinking how tedious all that formality was, and how much more sensible to be married by an alderman or justice of the peace, privately, in two minutes. Miss Pillbody did not agree with her future husband on this point, and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... different manner. Men are as shrewd and sensible, as alive to the humorous, and as hard-headed. Moreover, there is much nonsense in the old country from which people here are free. There is little conventionalism, little formality, and much liberality of sentiment; very little sectarianism, and, as a general rule, a healthy, sensible tone in conversation, which I like much. But it does not do to speak about John Sebastian ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... man's natural reserve and conventionalism were borne down by the sense of his helplessness. He was fighting against a giant of egoism, as it seemed to him, of gross and criminal stupidity, for ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... Poseidon?" There is a fact for you; noteworthy, I think! There is no personal character in true Greek art:—abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice,—yes: but there is no individuality; and the negative holds down to the revived conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you how you are to paint young women, and how old ones; though a Greek would hardly have been so discourteous to age as the Italian is in his canon of it,—"old women ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... been struck by the incongruous contact of the painted semblance with the blushing reality; but now it reminded him too keenly that the sphere within which he was bound, a social Ixion upon the petty wheel of conventionalism, was one grand combination of artificial trivialities and senseless shams. Goaded beyond endurance by the reflection, he impatiently made his escape into the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... night!" But the next moment she felt that there was about her love a piquant sense of peril and lawlessness, a wild flavor infinitely more to her taste than would be any prudent, commendable affection grown in drawing-rooms, nourished by conventionalism, and propped by social fitness; and remembering the manly beauty and brilliant parts of her lover, she felt that she would not exchange him for the proudest noble of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... architectural history, the Orders and their applications, drawing, sketching, and tracing, analytic geometry, differential calculus, physics, descriptive geometry, botany, and physical geography. In the third year the course is extended to the theory of decoration, color, form, and proportion; conventionalism, symbolism, the decorative arts, stained glass, fresco painting, tiles, terra-cotta, original designs, specifications, integral calculus, strength of materials, dynamics, bridges and roofs, stereotomy. In the fourth year the student is turned out a finished architect, after a course ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... reasons generally assigned for this perverse conventionalism of devoting the time of youth to the acquirement of dead words, to the unavoidable exclusion of nearly every thing that is of value? First, we are told that we can not understand the English language without a knowledge of Latin, ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... watchfulness for the result. The worthy magistrate, who had been conversant with all degrees and qualities of mankind, could not but perceive every motion and gesture of the distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance, and transformed him into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of any thing completely and consummately artificial, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... into a Cimabue picture, or a Tafi mosaic, still,—except that the Madonna was to have a blue dress, and everything else as much gold on it as could be managed,—there was very little advance in notions of colour. Suddenly, Giotto threw aside all the glitter, and all the conventionalism; and declared that he saw the sky blue, the tablecloth white, and angels, when he dreamed of them, rosy. And he simply founded the schools of colour in Italy—Venetian and all, as I will show you to-morrow morning, if it is fine. ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin

... was a feeble conventionalism; but it was all she could say. She, however, DID something. Hitherto it had been her habit to systematically reject his assistance in mounting to her seat. Now she awaited him. As he approached, she smiled, and put out her little foot. He instantly stooped; she placed it in his ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... excuse you," said Mrs. Sealy, after a significant pause, and her tone conveyed the idea that the remark was merely a cold conventionalism. ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... and casts the shield of His approval round the children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleased with the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should have kept up their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! How their fresh treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! The priests had, no doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had been going on, but they had not dared to interfere with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in fine, issued his Dictionary, the work of eight years, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... holds such mysterious power. Simplicity and joy were the two keynotes of the life taught by St. Francis. "Poverty," he asserted, "is the happy state of life in which men are set free from the trammels of conventionalism, and can breathe the pure air of God's love. The richest inward life is enjoyed when life is poorest outwardly. Be poor," he continued, "try a new principle; be careless of having and getting; try being, for a change. Our life in the world ought to be such that any one on meeting us ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement. And these elements of tranquillity, of repose, they unite to an intense and individual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and subtle as that of the Greeks, repressing all such curves as indicate solid form, and throwing the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... limits, the combing crest of the wave tells that the hour of safety has arrived, proving that God was wiser than you in writing down laws for His creation. We need not bridge over woman's nature with the ice of conventionalism, for fear she will swell up, aye, and overflow the continent of manhood. There is no danger. Trust to the nature God has given to humanity, and do not except the nature He has given to this ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... there has been a reaction against conventionalism which called itself Idealism, in favour of DETAILISM which calls itself Realism. As a reaction it has been of service; but it has led to much false criticism, and not a little false art, by an obtrusiveness of Detail and a preference for the Familiar, under the misleading notion of ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question of realism versus conventionalism in art—a subject much too large to ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... about six weeks ago there came along a very peculiar man. He seemed to be just adapted to the place. He was fresh from the seminary. He had a wife but no children. He was full of enthusiasm. As a preacher he was free from conventionalism, bright, sparkling, brilliant; more brilliant than warm. In private life he was social, genial, unministerial. Old Aunt Sue did indeed complain that when he called there he did not offer to pray with her. And good old Father Haines ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott



Words linked to "Conventionalism" :   conventional, unconventionality, unconventional, conformity, orthodoxy, ossification



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