In Literature
- Common medlar, the fruit of Mespilus germanica, has been used as a metaphor
- for age, particularly premature age
- in British plays from the 16th and 17th centuries, references to the fruit are associated with a bawdy name for it: "open-arses"
- Giovanni Verga's novel of Sicilian peasant life is called "I Malavoglia: The House by the Medlar Tree"
Read more about this topic: Medlar
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)