This paper addresses methodological problems and questions regarding the corpus-based and corpus-driven analysis of figurative language in the "AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus" [www.aac.ac.at]. The AAC is a well structured corpus of German-language literary texts that offers some interesting source material for the analysis of figurative language. The paper poses general questions about linguistics and corpus linguistics in relation to the use of figurative language. At the same time, specific issues regarding particular phenomena of figurative expressions in literary texts is dealt with in some detail. The use of metaphorical expressions and idiomatic multi-word units is given a particular emphasis in this paper.