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, Texture 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 has lectured in stylistics and literature across the world. His recent books include Language in Theory (with Mark Robson, 2005), Cognitive Poetics (2002), Sociolinguistics (2002), The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000), and several edited collections and textbooks in the fields of sociolinguistics, stylistics and linguistic theory.