Matthew Oliver is a professor of English at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Building Worlds with Words in Epic Fantasy

Section I: Syntactic Complexity

Chapter 1.

"The Riotous Conflagration of Beauteous Language": Flowery Style, Defamiliarization, and Empathic Imagination

Chapter 2.

"A Necessary Subtraction": Simplicity, the Violent Emotion of Editing, and the Editing of Violence

Section II: Narrative Perspective

Chapter 3.

Third-Person Heroism: Authority, Omnipotent Narration, and the Distribution of Visibility

Chapter 4.

First-Person Epic Novels: Metafantasy and Fluid Perspective

Section III: Wonder

Chapter 5.

Spoiler Alert: Twists, the Sense of Wonder, and Narrative Transcendence

Chapter 6.

The Mundane Fantastic: Stylistic Magic and Genre Collisions

Section IV: Narrative Frames

Chapter 7.

Narrative Frames: Paratexts, Blurred Boundaries, and the Deconstruction of Essentialist Narrative

Chapter 8.

Frame Narratives: Historical Truth, Literal Metaphors, and Epic Irony

Chapter Notes

Works Cited

Index