Overview

Reframing debates surrounding long narratives to explore their impact, this book develops a critical vocabulary for discussing the formal, social, and political affordances of length and duration in fantasy novels, and by extension, other genres. Beloved by fans, fantasy books frequently receive dismissive treatment from book reviewers and academics. For literary critics, lengthy narratives have long posed problems: for aesthetic critics, they are too sprawling and unstructured; for the politically engaged, they are suspect as part of a culture industry that commodifies texts. Reading Length in Fantasy Fiction switches up this discussion of long narratives, exploring their use of repetitions, narrative rhythms, and complexly ramifying structures to shape readers’ perspectives on such concepts as historical causation, group inclusion, the conflict between traditional values and innovation, and human agency in relation to a complex social totality. As the first book-length study of the length of fantasy novels, this book uses insights from aesthetic theory, phenomenology, and cognitive studies to ask both “what does length do for fantasy narratives?” and also “how does fantasy length help us understand the function of extended duration in narrative?” Calling upon readings from a diverse set of writers including J. R. R. Tolkien, Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James, Barbara Hambly, Steven Erikson, Samuel Delany and Katharine Kerr, Matthew Oliver illustrates the breadth of approaches structuring long fiction and the impact of strategies for managing length on a range of issues including race, gender, and social class. Finally, offering a critical vocabulary for the formal analysis of length and a set of tools for relating the duration of texts to their social and political consequences, this book presents a major intervention in criticism of the fantastic.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr Matthew Oliver (Professor of English, Campbellsville University, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:  

9781350502215

ISBN 10:   1350502219
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   19 March 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Tables Preface Introduction—Reading (for) Length Part 1: Strategies of Length Chapter 1—The Politics of Length: Managing Sprawl with Narrative Rhythm in Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive Chapter 2—Go with the Flow: Sprawling Ramification and Distraction in Steven Erikson’s Network Fantasy Part 2: Interventions of Length Chapter 3—“Partners in Making and Delight”: Fantasy Interventions in Labor and Leisure Chapter 4—The Same Thing Over and Over: How Serialized Sprawl Disrupts Gender-Coded Temporality Chapter 5—Alternative Branches: The Subjunctive, Impatience, and Transformation in Delany and Jemisin Notes Works Cited

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Author Information

Matthew Oliver is Professor of English at Campbellsville University, USA. He teaches and researches 20th and 21st-century British literature, the fantastic (with a focus on epic fantasy), and the grotesque. He has previously published Magic Words, Magic Worlds (2022), a stylistic analysis of epic fantasy, as well as articles about fantasy action scenes and writers such as Steven Erikson, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Robin Hobb.

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