This paper reports on an ongoing project on literary metaphor that applies analytical tools from cognitive linguistics (cl) to six English novellas and presents a case study. The project focuses on complex tropes, metaphors, coherence and cohesion in text units as well as text cues that involve the reader at a bodily level. Its hallmark is systematic and multi-level metaphor tagging and analysis with the qualitative coding software ATLAS.ti 5.2. The aim here is to raise three methodological points of increasing specificity. First, the paper explains the general benefits of a software-assisted qualitative analysis. Second, it presents a flexible and powerful approach for metaphor coding (which is extendable to non-literary applications). Third, it illustrates the gains from applying the approach to literature at a descriptive level, then in a more integrative literary analysis, and finally with regard to a novella’s general trends in metaphor use.