This theoretical and empirical study explores what happens in the minds of engaged readers when they read literature. It considers the roles that the text, the reading context, cognition, and emotion play, and it argues for the importance of understanding the "oceanic" interaction that takes place between those inputs.

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1: The Secret Lives of Reading and Remembering 2: Seeing, Thinking and Feeling 3: Literary Reading-induced Mental Imagery 4: Reading Moods and Reading Places 5: The Affective Nature of Literary Themes 6: From Style on the Page to Style in the Mind 7: Towards a Model of Emotion in Literary Reading 8: Literary Closure and Reader Epiphany 9: Reading the Closing Lines of The Great Gatsby 10: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the The Great Gatsby at Closure 11: Disportation Notes Bibliography Index

Michael Burke is the Head of the Academic Core Department and is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Pedagogy and English at the Roosevelt Academy Middelburg (Utrecht University). His publications include Contextualised Stylistics (with Stockwell and Bex).