Man"ner*ism (?), n. [Cf. F. maniérisme.] Adherence to a peculiar style or manner; a characteristic mode of action, bearing, or treatment, carried to excess, especially in literature or art.

Mannerism is pardonable,and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural . . . . But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive.

• In the artistic literature, a term coined by L. Lanzi at the end of the XVIII century to designate the ostentatious but innatural style of a pictorial current of the second half of the sixteenth century. In the contemporary criticism, the same current, understood as negation of the classicistic equilibrium and as search of a prebaroque, deforming expressivity; the analogue tendency present in the literature of the same age.
  
• In the field of figurative arts and of literature, every tendency that is inspired by previous models, aiming to the artificially varied reproduction of their expressive language.
  
• A group of dissociated, innatural, affected verbal and mimic behaviours that, in heavy form, are charateristic symptoms of schizophrenic states.