Jo Walton and The Blood of Kings Fantasy literature is the orphaned offspring of Romanticism. Open any fantasy novel and you will find themes and subject matter which once were the very mainstream of literature, but which have now been relegated to the backwaters of genre.
Fantasy literature is marked by a fascination with mythology, folk tale, and fable.
It is, in short, quite out of step with currents of modernist and postmodernist thinking in which antiheroes replace heroes, subjective fragmentation replaces narrative, and irony is privileged over myth. Against such a background, fantasy literature is pointedly anachronistic. Yet such anachronism was once the height of fashion. Grimm set out to reclaim a treasury of forgotten lore from musty manuscripts and half-remembered folk tales. Ultimately Romanticism was a reaction to the mechanistic world view of the Enlightenment, a protest against views which left no place for meaning, imagination, or spirituality.