Formulaicity and Creativity in Language and Literature

Formulaicity in literature has long been disparaged as the opposite of creativity, and a hallmark of ‘genre fiction’ of questionable aesthetic value. However, more recent approaches see all writing as intertextual – a tissue of citations and creative reworkings of other texts. This book elucidates the nature of semi-fixed formulaic sequences and provides a convincing reassessment of the potential creativity of the formulaic in a variety of linguistic and literary contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.