ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The notion of poetic foregrounding, as a touchstone of literary effect through the use of language, has been inherited from the Russian Formalists via the Prague School structuralists (see van Peer 1986: 1-24). With such a background, it is not obvious that this concept can be revealingly applied to the study of literary discourse in relation to its context - whether we are concerned with the fictional or real-world context of a work of literature.
