SOURCE: "Victorian and Modern Fantasy: Some Contrasts," in The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 9-22.

In the following essay, Manlove investigates the differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantasy, noting that Victorian authors questioned assumptions and relied on rules and logic more than present-day authors.

Although fantasy has developed out of all recognition from its origins, it may be of interest to retrace the journey. Rather too many accounts of fantasy, including mine, have emphasized its static quality, those elements that Poe shares with Pynchon, or MacDonald with Le Guin. But there are many differences too, and significant ones, which may be worth sketching, for fantasy has a history and is responsive to cultural or societal changes, a sort of random upthrust...