Textures of reading: Narrative emotion and olfactory engagement in multisensory stories

This article examines how narrative emotion and embodied experience take shape as textural atmospheres in olfactory multisensory story design. Drawing on two Norwegian digital picturebooks enhanced with four abstract scents, the analysis traces how smell organises the felt rhythm of reading, orientation, suspension, crisis, and closure, through shifts in affective texture rather than explicit description. Guided by critical sensory multimodal literacy (CSML) as the primary interpretive framework, and informed by phenomenological perspectives on embodiment, the analysis reads each scent encounter as a moment of embodied attunement in which meaning emerges through sensing, not only through language. We situate olfaction within multimodal and socio-material relations, demonstrating how designed scent cues mediate attention, proximity, and belonging in shared reading experiences. The article contributes to discussions on corporeality and texture by framing smell as an atmosphere of narrative experience, an inclusive pathway where the somatic becomes semantic. Rather than treating odour as novelty, we argue that olfactory pacing and valence weave coherent textures of anticipation, tension, and repose that make stories lived as much as read.