inversiveness

Meanings

nouninversiveness (uncountable)

uncountableThe quality of being inversive.
Charles Dibdin introduced his comic entertainment The Quizes, or A Trip to Elysium in 1793 with a song entitled ‘The Etymology of Quiz’, which reflects rather sharply on the inversiveness that is a feature of the quiz, in which all that is required to be a quiz is to seem quizzible to a quizzer: […]
2019, Steven Connor, “Quisition”, in The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing, London: Reaktion Books, →ISBN, page 200
2 more examples
Correlatively, “the Bottom,” which serves as Sula’s vernacular setting, becomes a field where specifically Afro-American women’s places—Eva Peace’s and Helene Wright’s houses, Edna Finch’s Mellow House, and Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology—offer an energetic figuration of patterns of purity and danger, order and inversiveness in Afro-American life.
1991, Houston A[lfred] Baker, Jr., “Theoretical Returns”, in Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Black Literature and Culture), Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 62
Then there is a formalistic explanation to the effect that the masque has to be truncated to allow the play to continue as a play. Yet this explanation […] ignores the deliberate inversiveness of the moment – the way in which Prospero’s ‘beating mind’ and ‘distempered’ visage represent a resurgence of the chaotic imagery of tempestuousness and disordered passion over the hard-won victory of music, harmony, temperance and ‘re-education’.
2000, John Gillies, “The Figure of the New World in The Tempest”, in Peter Hulme, William H. Sherman, editors, “The Tempest” and Its Travels, Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, part III (Transatlantic Routes), page 200
Synonyms: inversivity