Palgrave Macmillan X PREFACE
The Evolution of Modern Fantasy From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series Jamie Williamson palgrave macmillan x PREFACE some cohesion. On the other hand, this approach tends toward oversim plification and breeds a kind of tunnel vision. One area which that tunnel vision has largely eliminated from consid eration in histories of fantasy has been the narrative poetry, some quite long, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: work that engaged similar subject matter, identifieditself with similar areas of premodem and tradi tional narrative, and was widely read by many of the writers of the BAFS Introduction canon. Another area, not neglected but needing some refinement of per spective, has to do with those "epics and romances and sagas": they are gen erally alluded to rather indiscriminately as stufffrom (vaguely) "way back Charting the Terrain then." But modern access to these works is via scholarly editions, transla tions, epitomes, and retellings, themselves reflectingmodern perspectives; to readers of two centuries ago, the medieval Arthurian romances seeing print forthe first time were as new as Pride and Prejudice. My contention is that what we call modern fantasywas in facta creative extension of the he coalesc�ce of fantasy-thatcontem or ry l ter cat go y wh s _ _ r, � � �,:, � � � : antiquarian work that made these older works available. The history here, Tname most readily evokes notions of epic trilogies witb mythic then, begins in the eighteenth century. settings and characters-into a discrete genre occurred quite recently and This is, obviously, a wide arc to cover, and the following, of necessity, abruptly, a direct result of the crossing of a resurgence of interest in Ameri treats individual authors and works with brevity; detailed close readinghas can popular "Sword and Sorcery" in the early 1960s with the massive com been avoided.
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