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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3886322" data-attributes="member: 18280">Hrm.  I think that something very like that was said.  Indeed, I think that some claimed that books such as Dracula and Tarzan of the Apes were not fantasy, nor was the film Nosferatu.  Frankly, IMHO, there was a heck of a lot of fantasy prior to 1980; what did not exist was the marketting push that there is now.  And, while I could easily find fantasy books in 1975 (say), I tend to think that much of the best fantasy that I've read this decade has not been marketted as such.What we have with fantasy now, IMHO, is exactly analogous to the pulps, which certainly predate 1980.  I missed the data H provided.Certainly, booksellers and publishers saw fantasy in a different light due to The Sword of Shanara.  LotR sold a lot of copies.  A lot.  In a lot of languages.  Thereafter, publishers began to look for the "next big thing" they could market to LotR fans.  SoS was it.  It was the first novel marketted as fantasy to hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it eventually hit #1.Publishers saw money.  Imprints that previously existed for fantasy novels, but which did not contain the word "fantasy", began to use that word.  This led to a subset of fantasy being identified in the mainstream as "fantasy" and -- within a decade -- led to publishers using different labels for less mainstream fantasy novels.Or, at least, that's how I see it & my understanding.Certainly, the popularity of mainstream fantasy didn't hurt D&D when it burst onto the scene.  However, early D&D was informed by earlier fantasy work, and led players to discover the giants of the past as well as to create their own fantastic worlds.Again, IMHO.RC</blockquote>

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