Stylistics, Cognitive

Abstract

This article sets out to define the new discipline of cognitive stylistics, which is concerned with (literary) reading processes. It begins by setting out the field's literary stylistic roots and goes on to show how other disciplines like cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and discourse psychology have all had a bearing on its development by introducing a top-down dimension to literary text processing. The article highlights some of the more relevant works in the field and how cognitive stylistics may develop in the future as it embraces cognitive neuroscience and begins to explore the affective domains of cognitive reading processes.