Just as the story of an epic poem is woven from characters and plot, so too the individual similes within an epic create a unique simile world. Like any other story, it is peopled by individual characters, happenings, and experiences, such as the shepherd and his flocks, a storm at sea, or predators hunting prey. The simile world that complements the epic mythological story is re-imagined afresh in relation to the themes of each epic poem. As Deborah Beck argues in this stimulating book, over time a simile world takes shape across many poems composed over many centuries. This evolving landscape resembles the epic story world of battles, voyages, and heroes that comes into being through relationships among different epic poems. Epic narrative is woven from a warp of the mythological story world and a weft of the simile world. They are partners in creating the fabric of epic poetry.

•     Changes our understanding of how similes shape epic narrative
•     Combines detailed analyses of individual epic poems and their similes with a broad literary and historical context of multiple epic poems over time
•     Analyzes similes from the perspective of embodied cognition and immersion