This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

This chapter describes the process whereby modern Russian literature came into being and entered the western European cultural mainstream in the eighteenth century. The period witnessed the creation of a modern vernacular Russian literary language and saw the development of the basic features of a modern literature with its literary and institutional infrastructure. The term ‘Classicism’ came into use in the 1820s as a retroactive label that disparaged the previous century’s literature as hopelessly rule-bound and obsolete, but this hardly corresponds to its complex, dynamic, and in fact intensely creative character. The chapter surveys the period through the lens of the modern literary language, with a focus on the creation of the so-called ‘Slaveno-Russian cultural and linguistic synthesis’ of mid-century that resolved the problem of the Baroque heritage and fundamentally shaped the literary practice of the age.

This chapter examines Clare’s place among the poets in his own lifetime and more recently. The first section considers his appeal to recent and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Paulin. It argues that they have been inspired by Clare’s commitment to the local and provincial, especially his use of local vernacular, and also by his aesthetic of the uncouth and rebarbative, which also influenced Thomas. It goes on to explore how Clare’s close sensory attention to the natural world influenced Thomas, Longley, Oswald, and Jamie.  The second section argues that Clare’s poetry developed in conversation with his wide reading. It focuses on a number of examples, including Collins, Cowper, and Thomson. Reading these poets alongside and through Clare we see new features of their writing emerge, giving us a richer, more dynamic sense of eighteenth-century verse, and of Clare’s poetry.