10 Examples of Literary Description

The literary description is a discourse tool in which a character lists the characteristics of a certain thing (object, place, situation, idea, person, animal) tending to embellish the features or information sought highlight. The language that employs this type of description makes use of literary resources that adorn emotions, feelings, the sensations and perceptions that are exposed, and its objective is to provoke an aesthetic delight in the receiver. For example: The house was quiet now and not even the slightest sound from the misty streets broke the silence.. (The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers)

It is the description that we commonly find in the literary texts, present in genres such as novel, the story, the cartoon, the chronicle, etc. East type of speech it does not need the precision of the data as in the scientific or technical description, nor its objectivity.

When the literary description refers to a person, real or fictitious, it is called portrait.

• See also:Description Types

Characteristics of literary description

• Details physical or psychological characteristics of the exhibit
• It has an aesthetic and narrative intention.
• It is plausible and subjective.
• It is a descriptive pause, since it stops the narration of the events for a moment to focus on describing a certain space, situation, object, person.

Functions of literary description

• Create a literary atmosphere to introduce the reader into the story and generate a specific effect on it, be it intrigue, horror, drama, etc.
• reflect feelings and emotions characters to show the state of the situation of a certain scene.
• Make visible the scenarios in which the action takes place, especially important in the physical spaces of fantasy and science fiction literature.
• Characterize the characters in the story, not only from their physical appearance but also their psychological character.
• Slow down the story, to create a pause in the reading of the facts and invite reflection after, for example, an action scene.

Examples of literary description

1. Description of a character in the novel Fortunate and Jacinta by Benito Perez Galdos

She was a woman older than old, and it was well known that she had never been beautiful. She must have once had good meat; but already her body was full of folds and dents like an empty satchel. There, truth be told, she didn't know what chest was, nor what belly was. Her face was snouted and unpleasant. If she expressed anything she was a very bad temper and a vinegar character; but in this she deceived that face like many others who make believe what is not. Nicanora was an unhappy woman, of more kindness than understanding, tested in the struggles of life, which had been for her a battle without victories or any respite. She no longer defended herself except with patience, and from looking at her face so much at her adversity it must have caused that elongation of the snout that made her look considerably ugly.

1. Description of a character in the novel Big hopes by Charles Dickens

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was twenty years older than I, and she had made quite a reputation with herself and her neighbors for raising me "by hand." As at that time she had to find out the meaning of this expression on my own, and on the other hand I knew that she had a strong hand and heavy, as well as the habit of dropping it on her husband and me, I assumed that both Joe Gargery and I had been raised "to hand".

My sister couldn't have called herself beautiful, and I had a vague impression that she must have forced Joe Gargery to marry her, also "by hand." Joe was handsome; To either side of his smooth face were a few locks of golden hair, and his eyes were a shade of blue so indecisive that they seemed to have blended, in part, with their whites. He was a soft, kind, good-tempered, friendly, giddy man and a very good person; a kind of Hercules, both in terms of his strength and his weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, had black hair and eyes, and a complexion so ruddy that I often wondered if she would wash with a grater instead of soap. She was tall and she almost always wore a coarse apron, tied behind her with two ribbons and provided in front with an impregnable breastplate, for it was full of pins and needles. She was very proud of wearing such an apron, and it was one of her reproaches directed at Joe. Despite his puffiness, I saw no reason for him to wear it.

1. Description of a character from his psychology, in the book History of Spain told for skepticsby Juan Eslava Galan

Felipe II was a weak man with power, an inexpressive and taciturn hypochondriac, distant and cold, terribly indecisive and very timid, even though he was invested with all the power in the world. It is still curious that this little man, sinister no matter how many times it is given, and called with evident mistake "the king prudent” by flattering historians, has always had his supporters, who have identified him with the intimate essence of Spain. […] He was a bureaucrat, a gray man (although he preferred black, a color that has since been imitated by the court).

1. Description of a place in the book of essays around the casticism by Miguel de Unamuno

Castile is wide! and how beautiful the restful sadness of that petrified sea full of sky! It is a uniform and monotonous landscape in its contrasts of light and shadow, in its dissociated inks and poor in nuances.

The lands are presented as an immense mosaic plate of very poor variety, on which the intense blue of the sky extends. Smooth transitions are lacking, nor is there any harmonic continuity other than that of the immense plain and the compact blue that covers and illuminates it.

This landscape does not arouse voluptuous feelings of joie de vivre, nor does it suggest sensations of comfort and ease. concupiscibles: it is not a green and greasy field that makes you want to wallow, nor are there folds of earth that call like a nest.

The contemplation of him does not evoke the animal that sleeps in all of us, and that, half awake from his drowsiness, basks in the aftermath of satisfactions of appetites kneaded with his flesh from the dawn of his life, to the presence of leafy fields of vegetation opulent It is not a nature that recreates the spirit.

[…] There is no communion with nature here, nor does nature absorb us in its splendid exuberance; it is, if it may be said, more than pantheistic, a monotheistic landscape, this infinite field in which, without lost, man shrinks, and in the one who feels, in the midst of the drought of the fields, dryness of the soul […].

1. Description of an object in the novel Summer of J. m. Coetzee

September 1, 1972

The house in which she lives with her father dates from the 1920s. The walls, built of partly fired brick but mostly adobe, are now so deteriorated by moisture seeping from the ground that they have begun to crumble. Isolating them from moisture is an impossible task; the best that can be done is to install a waterproof concrete scrim around the perimeter of the house and hope that it will dry slowly.

1. Description of an animal in the lyrical work Platero and me by Juan Ramon Jimenez

Platero is small, hairy, soft; so soft on the outside, that he would be said to be all cotton, that he does not have bones. Only the jet mirrors of her eyes are hard as two black glass beetles.

1. Description of a character in the novel Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós

She was young, pretty, slender, with an almost implausible whiteness of pure alabaster; the colorless cheeks, the black eyes more remarkable for their liveliness and luminosity than for their largeness; her incredible eyebrows, as if indicated in an arch with the tip of a very fine brush; her little mouth was small and red, with somewhat thick lips, plump, bursting with blood, as if they contained all that was missing on her face; her teeth, small, bits of curdled glass; her hair was brown and not very copious, shiny as strands of silk and gathered in a graceful mess on the crown of her head. But the most characteristic thing about such a singular creature was that all of her seemed like a pure ermine and the spirit of neatness, because not even lowering herself to the coarsest domestic chores did she get stained. Her hands, in a perfect way —what hands!—, had a mysterious virtue, like her body and clothes, to be able to say to the lower layers of the physical world: your misery non mi tange. In his whole person he carried the impression of an intrinsic, elementary, superior cleanliness prior to any contact with anything unclean or impure. Of trapillo, fox in hand, the dust and the garbage respected her; and when she dressed up and put on her purple dressing gown with white rosettes, her top bun, pierced with golden-headed hairpins, was a faithful image of a high-pompadour Japanese lady. But what else, if all of her seemed to be made of paper, of that plastic paper, hot and alive in which those Oriental-inspired figures represent the divine and the human, the comic to the serious, and the serious that makes laugh? Her face was made of clear paper, her matte white, her dress was made of paper, her fine, shapely, incomparable hands were made of paper.

1. Description of a place, from the novel Memories of Africa by Isaac Dinesen

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The equator ran through these highlands a hundred miles to the north, and the farm sat at an elevation of about six thousand feet. During the day you felt at a high altitude, close to the sun, the early mornings and evenings were clear and calm, and the nights cold. The geographical situation and the altitude combined to form a unique landscape in the world. It was neither excessive nor opulent; it was Africa distilled at six thousand feet, like the intense and refined essence of a continent. The colors were dry and burnt, like the colors in ceramics. The trees had luminous and delicate foliage, different in structure from that of trees in Europe; they did not grow in arches or domes, but in horizontal layers, and their shape gave the tall solitary trees a resemblance to palm trees, or a romantic air. and heroic, like rigged ships with full sails, and the edges of the forest had a strange appearance, as if the whole forest were vibrating slightly. Bare twisted acacias grew here and there among the grass of the great prairies, and the grass smelled like thyme and bayberry; in some places the smell was so strong that it stung the nose. All the flowers you found in the meadows or among the climbers and lianas of the native forests were tiny, like dune flowers; only at the very beginning of the great rains did a certain number of large and heavy very fragrant lilies grow. The panoramas were immensely empty. Everything that was seen was made for greatness and freedom, and possessed an unmatched nobility.

1. Description of a place and a character in the novel One hundred years of solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty mud and cañabrava houses built on the banks of a river diaphanous waters that rushed through a bed of polished stones, white and enormous as eggs prehistoric The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention them you had to point your finger at them. Every year, during the month of March, a family of ragged gypsies pitched their tent near the village, and with a great uproar of whistles and kettledrums they announced new inventions. First they brought the imam. A corpulent gypsy, with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, made a truculent public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the wise alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots, and everyone was shocked to see that the cauldrons, the pans, the tongs and the stoves They fell from their place, and the wood creaked with the desperation of the nails and screws trying to disengage, and even the lost objects for a long time they appeared where they had been most sought after, and they dragged themselves in turbulent disarray behind the magic irons of Melquiades.

1. Description of a place in the story "Journey to the seed" by Alejo Carpentier

The tiles had already been lowered, covering the dead flowerbeds with their baked-clay mosaic. Above, the peaks loosened masonry stones, rolling them down wooden channels, with a great uproar of lime and plaster. And through the successive battlements that were toothless the walls appeared —stripped of their secret— oval or square ceilings, cornices, garlands, denticles, astragalus, and glued papers that hung from the fronts like old snake skins on change. Witnessing the demolition, a Ceres with a broken nose and faded peplum, her headdress streaked with black, stood in her backyard, over her fountain of blurred masks. Visited by the sun in hours of shade, the gray fish in the pond yawned in warm, mossy water, looking with a round eye at those workers, black against a clear sky, who were lowering the secular height of home.

It may interest you:

• Technical description
• topographical description
• Static and dynamic description
• literary language
• literary paragraphs