There's something rather funny about using "traditional" as an additional adjective for a genre whose name fundamentally means "fantasy set in our modern world" -- what does that make the first half of the genre, "traditional stories in a modern world"? Heh. I tend to make the same distinction you're making, except I think of them as literary contemporary fantasy versus action-adventure contemporary fantasy. The first kind (like DeLint) focuses more on internal, a dose of character development, and the finale may have some action but it's still considerably less external-focus than, say, the Bourne Ultimatum. The second kind is far more like its super-spy and action-thriller cousins, with far less focus on internal character development (sometimes almost none at all) and far more focus on the Big Bad and a finale with a massive bang-crash-slam kind of showdown, often also with guns.
I ran into the whole "what is urban fantasy" when reading books classed as "paranormal fantasy" that felt off-kilter somehow from what I expected, but I wasn't sure what I'd expected, so naturally contemplation must follow. I eventually came up with a way to differentiate paranormal from UF in terms of romance, and then later expanded that in terms of the fundamental difference between paranormal and urban fantasy. By that measure, then, pretty much most of the vampire/werewolf/etc books I don't count as "urban fantasy" but more as "occult" or "supernatural/paranormal". It's not a market division, but it's a handy mental measure for me to be able to determine which books would appeal to me -- I've little interest in paranormal, and much prefer fantastical.
As for Palmer's essay, I think you're right on target with the critiques, though I'd add that I think much of what makes it possible (in a 'this is allowed' sense) for him to say all that is that UF (or MUF, as you point out) is overwhelmingly dominated by female authors and female protagonists. I can't help but get the impression that it's one more essentialist move: when a man does X, then doing X is just part of the whole, while when a women does X, suddenly the woman is utterly defined by X.
A rather clunky way to describe how a man can write about sex and oh, that's just "something characters do in the course of the story" but a woman writing about sex and suddenly we can dismiss any other aspect of her writing/characters because really, "it's all about sex" -- with the underlying meaning there really being "it's all about sex as written by a woman" with the latter unspoken part amounting to "and therefore we can dismiss it as unimportant". Unlike, y'know, when it's written by a man, and only then does it not consume, define, or limit a view of the author or his work.
Basically, as I see it, Palmer is simultaneously saying UF can be dismissed for being nothing more than, y'know, a bunch of women writing porn that's cloaked in UF metaphors -- and then in nearly the same breath, he pats himself on the back for wanting to actually pay attention to that which he's effectively said can be dismissed as trivial. And to top it off, he seems to expect someone to give him a cookie for the maneuver! Idiot.
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I ran into the whole "what is urban fantasy" when reading books classed as "paranormal fantasy" that felt off-kilter somehow from what I expected, but I wasn't sure what I'd expected, so naturally contemplation must follow. I eventually came up with a way to differentiate paranormal from UF in terms of romance, and then later expanded that in terms of the fundamental difference between paranormal and urban fantasy. By that measure, then, pretty much most of the vampire/werewolf/etc books I don't count as "urban fantasy" but more as "occult" or "supernatural/paranormal". It's not a market division, but it's a handy mental measure for me to be able to determine which books would appeal to me -- I've little interest in paranormal, and much prefer fantastical.
As for Palmer's essay, I think you're right on target with the critiques, though I'd add that I think much of what makes it possible (in a 'this is allowed' sense) for him to say all that is that UF (or MUF, as you point out) is overwhelmingly dominated by female authors and female protagonists. I can't help but get the impression that it's one more essentialist move: when a man does X, then doing X is just part of the whole, while when a women does X, suddenly the woman is utterly defined by X.
A rather clunky way to describe how a man can write about sex and oh, that's just "something characters do in the course of the story" but a woman writing about sex and suddenly we can dismiss any other aspect of her writing/characters because really, "it's all about sex" -- with the underlying meaning there really being "it's all about sex as written by a woman" with the latter unspoken part amounting to "and therefore we can dismiss it as unimportant". Unlike, y'know, when it's written by a man, and only then does it not consume, define, or limit a view of the author or his work.
Basically, as I see it, Palmer is simultaneously saying UF can be dismissed for being nothing more than, y'know, a bunch of women writing porn that's cloaked in UF metaphors -- and then in nearly the same breath, he pats himself on the back for wanting to actually pay attention to that which he's effectively said can be dismissed as trivial. And to top it off, he seems to expect someone to give him a cookie for the maneuver! Idiot.