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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3886633" data-attributes="member: 30001">It's possible, I would think, to get a distorted view of what's interesting about the past based on what people of the present wish to study.  For example, if one is cover the art history of the early 20th century it might be that something like "Art Realism" might be covered because there were interesting (to the present) examples.  This argument goes both ways though - I could point out that the Wizard of Oz series of books were being published in the early Twentieth Centuries.  Of course that's not an indication of who was buying them, and assuming that Oz was popular then as now might possibly be an anachronism based on the success of the movies.  What I'm saying is that if current study popularly focuses on a certain trend at a certain time period, it doesn't mean that it was popular then (and, as I said, this could support either side of the argument).Also, I wonder about the medium.  How much poetry, for example, should factor into the overall question of how much fantasy was part of people's consciousness at the time period (I'm thinking of Poe).  It might be anachronistic to assume that paper-back novels (if such even existed) was the main vehicle of satisfying the public's demand for stories of magic and monsters.</blockquote>