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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PeterWeller" data-source="post: 3883915" data-attributes="member: 55795">I'm not so exasperated anymore, so I can put this politely.Hussar, your problem is that you are confusing what a literary category is with a literary genre.  Genre is just a collection of common tropes that can be used to say this [book] is like that [book] because of these tropes.  Thus anything that contains fantasy tropes falls into the fantasy genre (along with any other genre it contains tropes from).  Category, on the other hand, while still being based on common tropes requires two things.  One, those tropes must be openly evident and must be major developing forces of the narrative, and two, a publisher must decide to market a book under that category.Genres are timeless and while they might not be defined until a certain point in time, they have, for all intents and purposes, existed as long as those tropes have existed, whether or not they have been recognized as distinct genre of fiction.  Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts are both fantasy, but by your definitions, their source material isn't.  How does this make any sense?  Is it because of some arbitrary cut off point?  Does the fact that the Greek's only recognized two genres (tragedy and comedy; and they didn't even consider a divide between fiction and non-fiction for that matter) mean that anything they created only falls into these two genres?  Does that mean that the Odyssey isn't an epic?I take it you don't have a strong literary background.  I'm not trying to be patronizing here; I'm just putting forth an inference I've gathered from your thinking.  The reason why I bring this up is because if so, it's totally understandable that you would confuse genre with category.  Most people that are even aware of the two terms assume they are synonyms, and often use the word genre when they mean category (not using the word, category, at all).  This, however, is simply not the case.  Genre, again, is just a collection of shared tropes that you can use to say "this is like that because of these."  Category, what you're talking about, are the more rigid and codified marketing divisions based in and around genres.  Genre is a timeless concept, arising from the first instance of a common trope.  Category is a modern invention based in the commodification of art.Now, one last thing.  Category is still not a rigid and unchangeable definition.  Cold Mountain (the great novel, not the decent film) was originally categorized as a romance.  It's miles deep in the romance genre, and that informed its publisher that it should be categorized and marketed as such.  However, it became immensely popular amongst the historical fiction audience (another genre it's miles deep in, but not nearly as popular a category as romance) as well as the general readership, prompting its re-categorization as a general fiction novel.  Notice, however, that its category was a decision based not only on what genre(s) it fit into but also what audience it could be marketed to.  That's the real important difference: genre doesn't care about audience, category does.Now, to go back to your original point: you're correct in saying that it was difficult to find fantasy novels prior to 1980, but only in the sense that it was difficult to find the fantasy category (which did exist prior to having its own shelves as a sub category of science fiction, a position it occupied since the pulp days), not the fantasy genre.I hope I've managed to explain the difference between the two, and also explain our apparent difference of opinion (which, as I gather, was always more a difference of terminology), and I want to apologize if at any point I came across as a jerk in this exchange.Oh, and one last thing.  There is no monster in Hound of the Baskervilles.  The hound is a hoax arrived at by some liberal use of phosphorous.  In fact, HotB is a criticism and commentary on the very genres you mentioned.  Doyle greatly disapproved of fantasy and horror, considering them trite (kind of like Cervantes when he wrote Don Quixote).</blockquote>

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