Cognitive poetics is a discipline of literary theory interested in the language of
literary texts as rooted in the body’s perceptual system. In general terms,
cognitive poetics explains what happens in the mind when literary texts are read, focussing on conceptual and sensory information emanating from the text as the reader progresses. Metaphors and metonymies can be seen as instances of conceptual and sensory information that determine the reader’s interaction with the writer’s imagined worlds.

Cognitive poetics is part of the larger field of embodiment theory, an umbrella term that designates a large theoretical framework that encompasses a number of approaches to the relation of body and mind to the world. Developments in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, cognitive poetics and cultural geography, have contributed to an understanding of how human beings conceptualise and experience the world.

The most important theorists in the field of cognitive poetics are Israeli professor Reuven Tsur and Peter Stockwell. Tsur has published two important books
in the area and a large number of articles. One of his most influential
articles is ‘Aspects of Cognitive Poetics,’ in Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, and his book What Makes Sound Pattern Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception, published in 1992, has been influential too in his analysis of how vowel and consonant patterns are poetically perceived by readers.

Peter Stockwell, whose book Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, published in 2002. This is an excellent and easy to read introduction to the field of cognitive poetics although it does not focus so much on poetry (as Tsur’s book does) but on conceptual metaphor and other narrative techniques, from the perspective of reception and cognition.