literalism

Noun

literalism (usually uncountable, plural literalisms)

1. (usually) Literal interpretation or understanding; adherence to the exact letter or precise significance, as in interpreting or translating.
   • Literal interpretation has always been a marked feature of Premillennialism; in Dispensationalism it has been carried to an extreme. We have seen that this literalism found its most thoroughgoing expression in the claim that Israel must mean Israel, that it cannot mean the Church, that the Old...1945, Oswald Thompson Allis, “The Future of Israel and the Millennium”, in Prophecy and the Church: An Examination of the Claim of Dispensationalists that the Christian Church is a Mystery...
   • Elsewhere, the liturgiologists were said to have "disembowelled the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible" and produced in its place "the bland literalisms of Series 3 and the ASB[.]"1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 73
2. (usually) The style of art portraying a subject as literally and accurately as possible.
   • The two main forms of literalism are ergism and orthodoxy.2015, Søren Kierkegaard, Bruce H. Kirmmse, K. Brian Söderquist, Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE-KK, →ISBN