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The theme of this book is the writing process that begins with thoughts and ends in words fixed on a page: a process of `creative illusion' illustrated here with reference to classic authors as diverse as Jonathan Swift and Scott Fitzgerald. The writer's engagement with a developing text is seen at two levels: one, a mental level of imaginative play, the other an editorial level that determines patterns of form, punctuation, grammar, the representation of speech, the variance of vocabulary and rhetorical figure. Addressing notions of creativeness Professor Walter Nash raises questions of aesthetics and sylistics, and of the critical interpretation of literary texts. These questions invite studies of various literary moulds - narrative, argument, dialogue, poetic discourse and translation. They in their turn draw attention to the brute circumstances of composition that affect all writers, literary or otherwise, and the book ends accordingly with a chapter entitled `The Biro, the Word-Processor and Putting Pen to Paper', in which the diverse tools and materials of writing are examined in their relationship to the act of composing. Language and Creative Illusion will be essential reading for all students of language and literature, as well as providing useful material to undergraduate students of creative writing, stylistics, and composition.