About the heart,where it hurt exactly,and how often

Abstract

Stylisticians were among the first to draw on the insights emerging from cognitive science in order to explore literary works. Recent years have witnessed a wider diffusion of the cognitive turn across literary scholarship, with developments into literary cultural studies and historiography. Unfortunately, this has sometimes been accompanied by a relative neglect of textuality and texture. In this article, we argue again for the necessary centrality of stylistics in literary scholarship, and the continuing requirement to make textuality an integral part of cognitive poetic exploration. We demonstrate the value of Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007a, Werth, 1999) in requiring this integration as an inherent feature of the approach, in the process of exploring reading responses to an emotionally involving poem by Simon Armitage.