donnéen.
/ˈdɒneɪ/ The subject, theme, or motif of a story, play, etc.; a datum; a basic fact, assumption, etc.
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > perception or cognition > faculty of ideation > topic, subject-matter > materials of topic > [noun] > of particular subject
subjecta1400
subject?1541
tractate1589
subject matter1591
territory1640
donnée1876
1876 H. James in Atlantic Monthly XXXVIII. 693/2 A silly young girl and a heavy, overwise young man who don't fall in love with her! That is the donnée of eight monthly volumes. I call it very flat.
1878 H. James French Poets & Novelists 136 The donnée of ‘Le Père Goriot’ is typical.
1885 O. Wilde in 19th Cent. May . 806 There is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the donnée of the play was after the Fall.
1896 W. James Let. 11 June (1920) II. 37 B.'s moral atmosphere is anyhow so foreign to me, a lewdness so obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a moral donnée at all.
1920 T. S. Eliot Sacred Wood 57 It is perhaps the craving for some such donnée which draws us on toward the present mirage of poetic drama.
1925 Glasgow Herald 29 Aug. 4 In the same tale données from classical myth are also to be encountered.
1945 W. H. Auden Coll. Poetry 127 The flushed assault of your recognition is The donnée of this doubtful hour.
1956 Ess. in Crit. 6 73 Because she accepts sensation as a donné, Mrs Woolf accepts the flow of linear time.
1960 J. Bayley Characters of Love iv. 213 To move right away in discussion from the text and from the actual Jamesian donnée.
1966 Listener 14 July 65/1 One can see how these raw données could be cooked into a film—the boy's scales and sonatinas, the dockland sirens, the café radio.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1933; most recently modified version published online December 2020).
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n.1876