Texture represents the latest advance in cognitive poetics. The book builds feeling and embodied experience on to the insights into meaningfulness which the cognitive approach to literature has achieved in recent years. Taking key familiar concepts such as characterisation, tone, empathy, and identification, the book describes the natural experience of literary reading in a thorough and principled way. Accessibly and informatively written, the book draws on stylistics, psycholinguistics, critical theory and neurology to explore the nature of reading verbal art. The aim is a new cognitive aesthetics of literature for its academic, student, professional and natural readers.

Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published 20 books and 100 articles in stylistics, sociolinguistics, science fiction and applied linguistics, including Cognitive Poetics (2020), The Language of Surrealism (2017), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000). He co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Language and Literature Reader (2008), Contemporary Stylistics (2007) and Impossibility Fiction (1996). His work in cognitive poetics has been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Persian, Russian and Arabic.