Metagenre Thoughts

So, this summer, I read a lot of fantasy (mostly Terry Pratchett), and I did some reading up on the sci-fi/fantasy subculture (and I don't care if some think sci-fi is a dismissive title - I apply it happily to myself). I found that there are two major types of fantasy - "high" and "low." That got me thinking in another direction - the direction of the mystery genre. Mystery writers began writing cool, intellectual, polished stories featuring geniuses like Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Hercule Poirot. These writers wrote during the high "Golden Age of Mystery writing." They were followed stylistically by Josephine Tey and P. D. James (and possibly Laurie King). However, near the midpoint of the Golden Age, writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler ushered in the "hardboiled detective novel," firmly established in gritty detail, much more focused on both the drudge work of following clues, and the hard action (and often sex) rather than intellectual reasoning. Since that time, other than a few (like James and King) who remained in the Golden stream, most detective novels followed this "low" path, diverging into many tiny subgenres like the police procedural, the gumshoe/private eye, and many more.It seems to me, from the research I did, that fantasy followed a similar path: starting with the "high" writers, significantly Tolkien, Lewis' Narnia, LeGuin's Earthsea, fantasy was full of nobility, rarified speech and syntax, and world-threatening plots. However, as the genre developed, writers split off into "low" fantasy - subgenres such as the wish-fulfilling and unashamedly plagiarizing Sword and Sorcery type, the gritty, dark deconstructions such as LeGuin's follow ups to Earthsea like Tehanu, witty spoofs like Pratchett, and even some great psychological studies like Lewis' Till We Have Faces.So, I see a parallel pattern. Starting with a "norm" ("high fantasy" or "golden age mystery"), writers in these two genres began by portraying a genteel (mostly) world with characters who faced deadly threats to society/the world with grace and brilliance (moral or intellectual). Soon, however, other writers splintered away into many subgenres which were given a blanket metacatagory ("low fantasy," um, I don't think there is a overarching metacatagory for all the mystery subgenres, but the phenomenon is similar), which either merely added darker/grittier content or takes concepts in the "norm" genre and examines it from a new perspective (psychology, satire, deconstruction, lower class, etc).Perhaps an interesting topic for a paper sometime...In several years, of course. :-)