In this paper I examine the contribution of feelings to the reader’s literary understanding,focussing on aspects of response that have been studied through the use of empirical methods.I first provide a review of several components of feeling that have been found of importance in literary reading.I then focus on the role of feelings at several different levels.At the level of the stylistics of the text I consider studies of response to foregrounding and phonetic iconicity.At an intermediate level I look at a study of how feelings help to characterize episodes in narrative.Lastly I present a study at the largest scale(comprising a whole short story) of the role of feeling in elaborating an unreliable narrator,working largely through the comments of one reader.As a whole,the paper offers evidence for the range and variety of literary phenomena that draw on the capacities of feeling. In this paper I examine the contribution of feelings to the reader’s literary understanding, focussing on aspects of response that have been studied through the use of empirical methods. I first provide a review of several components of feeling that have been found of importance in literary reading .I then focus on the role of feelings at several different levels. At the level of the stylistics of the text I consider studies of response to foregrounding and phonetic iconicity. At an intermediate level I look at a study of how feelings help to characterize episodes in narrative. Lastly I present a study at the largest scale (including a whole short story) of the role of feeling in elaborating an unreliable narrator, worked largely through the comments of one reader. As a whole, the paper offers evidence for the range and variety of literary phenomena that draw on the capacities of feeling.