Matt Oliver has taught at Campbellsville since 2009. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his M.A. from Missouri State University, and his B.A. from Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri. He teaches and researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature, the fantastic (with a focus on epic fantasy), and the grotesque. He has recently published Magic Words, Magic Worlds (McFarland, 2022), a stylistic analysis of epic fantasy, and has also published research about writers such as Joseph Conrad, Angela Carter, Steven Erikson, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Robin Hobb. In his spare time, he runs the CU Board Game Club and enjoys spending time with his wife, Natalie, and his two daughters, Lucy and Maggie.
Publications
Books
Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy. McFarland, 2022.
Scholarly Journal Articles
“Conrad’s Grotesque Public.” Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 209-231.
“Iron(ic) Ladies: Thatcherism, Primitivism, and the Post-Imperial Grotesque in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2010, pp. 237-253. doi: 10.1093/cww/vpp039
“Conrad’s Grotesque Public.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 293: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Gale, 2014.
“‘The Riotous Conflagration of Beauteous Language’: Flowery Style, Defamiliarization, and Empathic Imagination in Epic Fantasy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 3, 2018, pp. 355-379.
“History in the Margins: Epigraphs and Negative Space in Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice.” Mythlore, vol. 41, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2022, pp. 45-66.
“‘A duet, in which your goal is to kill your partner’: Aggressive Empathy and Visceral Reading in Fantasy Action Scenes.” Extrapolation, forthcoming in vol. 64, no. 1.