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.