Construing and reconstruing the horrors of the trench: Siegfried Sassoon, creativity and context

Abstract Cognitive Grammar has emerged in recent years to become an established analytical method in cognitive stylistics. Although one of its key affordances is that it provides a robust framework for analysing the different ways in which scenes can be depicted, researchers have yet to develop an account of how Cognitive Grammar can support a detailed analysis of authorial creativity. This paper aims to redress the balance by using Cognitive Grammar to examine the relationship between creativity and the unique situations that give rise to writing in a diary entry and two subsequent rewritings of that entry by the First World War poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon. The paper combines ideas on contextual constraints with a text-driven, Cognitive Grammar-oriented analysis to demonstrate how a contextualized approach highlights the ways in which Sassoon’s writing is motivated by particular physical, social and cultural environments. These include the interaction with and reconfiguration of the material body within the physical setting of the military trench.