Fantasy Authors & Academic Popularity: A Tale of Haves and Have Nots

While admiring Brandon Sanderson's handling of Robert Jordan's material in the Wheel of Time series, which I'm finally reading, I grew curious about whom among modern fantasists tend to get the most academic attention. My hunch was that fantasy writers of the 1980s and 1990s -- or basically the guys who got me hooked on fantasy literature as a kid -- would come off poorly. (I was right). Overall, I've long suspected that the common narrative of doorstopper Tolkien-clone epic fantasy has led to academics treating some wonderful writers incredibly unfairly.

So, as a way of testing my hypothesis, I searched through the MLA International Bibliography. I did a basic search on an author's name, then looked at "peer-reviewed articles," "book chapters," and "books." For most of the less popular writers, I excluded things like encyclopedia entries, which tended to inflate hits.

This method, of course, isn't scientifically rigorous . . . but it does give a sense of how individual authors "rank" in terms of academic popularity. One thing that struck me: yeah, academics have clearly snubbed many of the "big name" fantasists of the 1980s and 1990s. The second thing that struck me, though, was the discrepancy between the "haves" and "have nots". Tolkien and Lewis have had mind-numbingly prodigious amounts of scholarship done on them.

Part of that simply stems from their relatively age. Their major works appeared in the 1950s, although the academic Tolkien boom didn't properly come until 2000. The weight of all this academic scholarship, though, does give a very lop-sided view of fantasy literature's post-Tolkien literary history. Makes me think that we desperately need something like a Journal of Popular Fantasy Literature Studies . . . something that has a more narrow focus than Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
 

Anyway, the results:
KEY: TOTAL -- AUTHOR -- (peer-reviewed articles / book chapters / books)

Fantasy authors of the 1980s and 1990s -- the HAVE NOTs
15—Anne McCaffrey (8, 6, 1)
13—Stephen R. Donaldson (4, 5, 4)
6—Guy Gavriel Kay (3, 2, 1)
3—Tad Williams (2, 1, 0)
3—Robert Jordan (1, 2, 0,).
3—David Eddings (2, 1, 0)
3—Brandon Sanderson (1, 1, 1)
3—Mercedes Lackey (3, 0, 0)
2--David Gemmell (1, 1, 0) 
1--Dave Duncan (0, 1, 0)
1—Robin Hobb (1, 0, 0)
1—Steven Brust (1, 0, 0)
0—Terry Goodkind (0, 0, 0)
0—Terry Brooks (0, 0, 0)
0—Glen Cook (0, 0, 0)


 Fantasy authors  -- the HAVEs
1,766—J. R. R. Tolkien (712, 877, 177)
1,271—C. S. Lewis (673, 450, 158)
724—J. K. Rowling (280, 402, 42)
463—Ursula K. Le Guin (248, 178, 41)
168—Philip Pullman (69, 88, 11)
122—George R. R. Martin (31, 85, 6)
115—Roger Zelazy (15, 98, 2)
70—Terry Pratchett (40, 27, 3).
41—Marion Zimmer Bradley (15, 23, 3)

Other Fantasy authors of note 
4--Diana L. Paxson (1, 3, 0) 
3—Stephen King—Dark Tower (2, 1, 0)
1—N. K. Jemisin (1, 0, 0)
4—Steven Erikson (3, 1, 0)
3—Joe Abercrombie (0, 3, 0)
0—Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weiss (0, 0, 0)
0—R. A. Salvatore (0, 0, 0)
1—Fiona McIntosh (1, 0, 0)
0—Patrick Rothfuss (0, 0, 0)
0—Robert Aspirin (0, 0, 0)

0--Simon R. Green (0, 0, 0)
0--Jennifer Roberson (0, 0, 0)
0--Sara Douglass (0, 0, 0)
0--Jacqueline Lichtenberg (0, 0, 0)

Oddities of Note:

• I’m shocked Steven King’s Dark Tower only had 3 hits.
• Not quite sure why Anne McCaffrey has so many more hits (relatively speaking) than Mercedes Lackey.
• Incidentally, I've written before how Stephen R. Donaldson hasn't gotten much love from academic critics. Well, turns out he's actually one of the more popular of the "have not" writers . . . and four academic monographs do handle his work in detail, which is significantly better than many, many others.
• Likewise, I've also wondered why Marion Zimmer Bradley hasn't received more attention. Well, according to this, she's also doing relatively well.
• The love for Zelazny surprised me. . . but he's also somewhat older and more well-established, too.
• No surprise that the best known shared-world D&D authors (Hickman & Weiss, Salvatore) have been ignored.