In the Shadow of Genre

I was sitting in a bar tonight reading Mary Renault's novel, The King Must Die. It's a pretty fun book, and while it's a mundane, magic-free novel about Ancient Greece, its characters clearly believe they inhabit a "magical" world animated by gods and spirits. Theseus and his fellows believe in the whole Greek pantheon with greater conviction than one normally encounters in contemporary mainstream fantasy.

It got me thinking. A lot of fantasy seems to take its cues from the pulps. But I...