0 A mannered style of speech or behaviour is artificial, or intended to achieve a particular effect:
His performance as Hamlet was criticized for being very mannered.
1 used to describe a person with the behaviour or character of the stated type:
These literary exercises were always mannered and probably always playful.
Purely formally, irony makes a transition from the highly mannered and restrictive metric forms of verse to the free seriousness of prose.
Moreover, the organisation of the book is mannered to the point of unhelpfulness.
The sales message should never become 'a mechanical statement repeated by rote', nor should it sound artificially mannered.
Written in the mannered style of the culturalstudies school, it lacks clarity and sometimes descends into the abstruse.
But the captions for the show itself, as quoted in the catalogue, are mannered and claustrophobic.
In fact, to describe the central performances in these terms could be misleading: to our eyes, the acting looks mannered, with a rather stilted, melodramatic quality about it.
