Historical Urban Fantasy?

[hitmouse]

I don't see anything unrealistic about seeing Epic and High as being the same thing. Not sure I agree with it, but plenty out there either seem to explicitly do so, or implicitly do so because they can't give a convincing case for where the borders lie and put the same books into both genres.

Point in case - if High Fantasy implies a strong focus on magic, how is Tolkien High Fantasy if we're regarding Martin and Abercrombie as not having a strong focus?

People are blaming Wiki for slipshod genre definitions but I think the blame lies with the definitions to begin with. I don't think fantasy's subgenres are at all well defined

The great thing about Wikipedia is that if you do not agree with something you can express your argument in the comments page. For urban fantasy that can be found here:
Talk:Urban fantasy - Wikipedia
There has been very little discussion since about 2013.
Looking at the edit history of the article: Talk:Urban fantasy: Revision history - Wikipedia the substantive part of the article was written by 2012, and there have been only minor tweaks since then.

Give it a while with comments, and if no-one objects, you can edit the prose on the main page. It would be regarded as impolite to simply edit the main article without discussing it first, and hopefully getting a consensus.

Editing wikipedia is easy and fun, and I would encourage people to contribute, thoughtfully. Not that easy to do it well: a well referenced piece is always better than a badly argued opinion-stated-as-fact. The point is that what is there at the moment is not immutable gospel, but rather part of an ongoing evolutionary process. The edit history of this article suggests it is quite dormant. Anything at all controversial, even in highly specialist subjects, generally has an ongoing debate, and usually results in a more rigorous and solid article.

 

[Caledfwlch]

I have always taken "Urban Fantasy" to mostly mean stories featuring mythological/supernatural creatures in the real concurrent world that we as readers can relate to. Even stories where at some point in the recent past, the reality has been revealed to the general public, causing what is in effect an alternate reality by our time, the world mostly looks like for example the real 21st century.

The Anita Blake novels are set in a 21st century where everyone knows the supernatural exists, Vampires have rights, and it looks/sounds very like the real 21st century United States, its just there are Vampires, lycanthropes etc.

 

[Massel]

I'm over medieval set fantasy (and I'm a medievalist) but urban fantasy doesn't generally float my boat either. I loved Bujold's Sharing Knife series and it is set in something like the 19th century US midwest and was more interested than the label indicated. I certainly wouldn't call it Urban Fantasy. Post-medieval fantasy could be a useful definition.