Manipulation is one of the concepts that needs a more in-depth theoretical and practical examination. It is employed in many areas of life, including personal and social matters, intellectual and professional pursuits, and, of course, politics. This paper is an approach, the purpose of which is to study the concept of manipulation as a psychological and linguistic phenomenon where the central emphasis is on the manipulative techniques and tactics that are utilized for various reasons such as illegitimate domination and social abuse. At this level of investigation we find it essential to illustrate different approaches to the study of this phenomenon as well as certain dictionary definitions to be able to fully perceive and comprehend the properties of manipulation.

The present paper deals with one of the intricate problems of philology – the question of reading and understanding a work of verbal creativity. The paper aims at emphasizing the methodological value of the hermeneutical approach to the study of literature which comes into being due to the presence of three basic components: imagination, language as a code between the writer and the reader, and the expected ability of the reader to share the author’s emotions and thoughts. Proceeding from the basic statements of hermeneutics and Schleiermacher’s theory of hermeneutical circle in particular, as well as considering the results of our former investigations we come to the conclusion that understanding verbal art is a complex process which is achieved step by step. To provide a reliable mechanism for the application of the hermeneutical approach the investigator has to take the following steps: 1) reveal the correlation of language and speech with the help of the linguostylistic method of analysis; 2) understand the aesthetic value of the work built up due to the complex relationship of the linguistic elements and the poetics of the work, which is brought out by the linguopoetic method of analysis; 3) come up to the metametasemiotic level of analysis which, in fact, belongs to the sphere of literature studies and helps reveal the intention of the author and the idea of the work.

Text is a broad notion. It may be expressed both in writing and orally in the form of a monologue, dialogue, utterance, etc. This may well be the reason for the persistent interest towards text as such. The great variety of studies on the nature of text and its objectives, however, are all somewhat controversial and lack a unified conceptual approach. Things get even more complicated due to the fact that now into scientific circulation has been introduced the notion of discourse, and evidently of considerable popularity in the current stage of the development of linguistics is the relationship between text and discourse. The present article focuses on the study of the correlation of text and discourse, views literary text as a unit of specific communication between the writer and the reader, as well as centers the attention on the consecutive stages of literary text perception and understanding.

National identity can be traced in almost all the spheres of human habitat – cultural, institutional, political, literary, pshychological, daily routine and many others, that is both in the verbal and non verbal activities of all and each person, respectively. In this research we look upon the British identity manifestations in the post-modern multifaceted literary frame based on the English short story contexts. Given the popular approach of the marked British conventionalism, concepts and cultural artefacts, as it were, we elucidate the stories of three  contemporary women writers — A.S. Byatt; J.Gardam and D.Moggach, as a field to reveal literary reproductions of identity paradigm and its social-cultural component in view of the city of London and certain niches of its subcultures. The analysis produces challenging ideas when considering social and spatial distinctions of London’s image according to the writers’ subjective attitudes, as well as the moral of the past and present, which are portrayed by three main topics: intellectuality and erudition (the London library); arts and theatre (the National Theatre and  Shakespeare); Post-colonial reality (Pakistani shopkeeper’s British dream-home), all of them as inseparable components of British national identity. 

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