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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PeterWeller" data-source="post: 3886512" data-attributes="member: 55795">Red Dawn was, of course, an expression of its time's fears while also an expression of American heroic ideals in counter to those fears.  Rambo played off largely the same feelings.  I think political suspense and spy thrillers like Clancy have been popular for almost as long as the modern nation state.  Even Doyle had Holmes engaging in espionage towards the end of his career.  I wouldn't consider any of these idealizations of the past.  Also, I believe our modern sensibilities don't consider our idealized pasts as ideal as we once did, which is where I think the current popularity of fantasy may reside.  We don't have to swallow our qualms about idealizing pasts that we know aren't the rosy good things that we would like them to be, and instead, we can transmit the positive values that we attribute to those times on to a completely different world that doesn't contain the negative baggage of our own history.  For example, say you would like to recapture the glory of Southern Gentility, but you don't want the baggage of slavery casting a pall over everything.  You can create a fantasy world where the positives of Antebellum Southern life exists without the negatives.You have a good point about the frequency of crisis, and I don't think there's a point in literate history where fantasy or other speculative fiction wasn't popular.  Though I'd say it appears as though they weren't as popular in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries as they are today, and it would seem like they hit a low point in popularity towards the end of the Nineteenth century, though there was a great resurgence in the early Twentieth.</blockquote>

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