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Title: Shallow Assessments Cloud And Demean The Genre
Review: This survey is the weak link in Routledge's stellar 'Genres in Context' series. The author's assessments of what he considers fantasy classics (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7) are more perfunctory summaries than perspicacious critiques; the reader often has to construct thematic concerns from the motifs and details which the author haphazardly limns. The one chapter devoted to the history of modern fantasy (Chapter 1) is woefully inadequate, failing to inform the uninitiated reader of the true depth and breadth of fantastical writing. (A comparison to Brooks Landon's supernal post-1900 science fiction survey - also from the 'Genres in Context' series - makes the lacunae in this survey all the more evident.) This tome - if in its brevity, it can be called such - serves only as a poignant reminder of the dearth of comprehensive and pensive scholarship on the fantasy genre.
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