Texture represents the latest advance in cognitive poetics. This 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 aims to describe 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.