prefigurement

pre·fig·ure

 (prē-fĭg′yər)
tr.v. pre·fig·ured, pre·fig·ur·ing, pre·fig·ures
1. To suggest, indicate, or represent by an antecedent form or model; presage or foreshadow: The paintings of Paul Cézanne prefigured the rise of cubism in the early 1900s.
2. Archaic To imagine in advance.

[Middle English prefiguren, from Old French prefigurer, from Late Latin praefigūrāre : Latin prae-, pre- + Latin figūrāre, to shape (from figūra, shape; see dheigh- in Indo-European roots).]

pre·fig′ur·a·tive (-fĭg′yər-ə-tĭv) adj.
pre·fig′ur·a·tive·ly adv.
pre·fig′ure·ment n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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prefigurement

noun
A phenomenon that serves as a sign or warning of some future good or evil:
Idiom: writing on the wall.
The American Heritage® Roget's Thesaurus. Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
In my experience, however, the meaning of purchasing and consuming a thing has everything to do with how I came to it and the imaginative prefigurement of ownership.
It was thus a pioneering community and a prefigurement of the coming State of Israel.
(The current name was adopted after shepherd Syphilis who was stricken with the French disease for an act of impiety in the popular 1530 poem by the Italian physician Fracastoro.) In Savonarola's Good Friday vision a black cross "Crux Irae Dei" rose above Rome, and a golden cross "Crux Misericordiae Dei" rose above Jerusalem and all the nations flocked to adore it, a curious prefigurement of the modern Divine Mercy devotion which starts on Good Friday.
The extolment of the Renaissance as a decisive break with the past became particularly important to communist ideology, for it found in that age an almost biblical prefigurement of the socialist revolution.
As a result, there is no doubt about the identity of such Old Testament types as "the Lamb of God" or "the Suffering Servant." Even the experience of Jonah in the belly of the whale is seen as a prefigurement of the mission and role of Jesus, especially his period in the tomb before the resurrection.
In a symbolic prefigurement of the deaths of the next war, Iris dreams of a 'field [...] littered with huddled bodies [...] she saw that they were not animals at all, but dead soldiers' (65).
Jesus makes Jonah a type of himself (that is, a prefigurement of himself) as judge when he says: "Behold, something greater than Jonah is here."
The article proposes that by such means and through its prefigurement of what Frank Kermode identifies in the work of modernists as the 'Romantic Image' Aylwin reveals the lines of a Romantic genealogy that extends from Coleridge through Rossetti to writers such as Yeats, demonstrating the hidden continuity between Romantic and late Victorian literature and mapping the crucial transition from late Victorian literature to literary modernism.
In the resulting shaft of light, Gura no longer spies Miller's Edwards, "a prefigurement of the artist in America," but he does glimpse a spiritual Edwards who is more small c "catholic" than big C "Calvinist." That is a somewhat different Edwards than we have now come to expect.
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