Perhaps a gentle reminder for promiscuous Tory rakes that Sir Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional character, and his world is a literary construct.

Unfortunately, Haynes overreaches for some characters, building literary constructs instead.

Unsworth's Iphigenia approaches her sacrificial altar more as a literary construct than as a real girl.

"But he's just a literary construct," John repeated doggedly.

But that's a literary construct.

David Lanoue maintained in 2005 that 'our image of Issa is a consciously designed literary construct...earthy, compassionate, child-and-animal loving, unconcerned about appearances or public rituals or wordly power'.

Four of these, he argued, represented witches who were "little more than literary constructs", owing more to the folk tales of the time than to any actual magical practitioners.

The invention of the matrix, even as a literary construct, marks the birth of cyberpunk fiction.

"We were getting away from the giant cabinet-of-curiosities approach to the idea of a good yarn, using literary and theatrical constructs," said Mr. Appelbaum.

Ziolkowski continued: "All in all, however, the story remains a lifeless literary construct.