What it sounds like, to me, is that Profesor Rabkin is something like twenty to twenty-five years behind the field - which is a poblem. He's still working in Rosemary Jackson/Christine Brooke-Rose territory (focussing on the fantastique rather than fantasy, without knowing that Attebery comprehensively unpacked the ways in which that perspective is just not applicable to modern genre fantasy a good fifteen years ago now, and the rest of the field hasn't been back there since.

Somebody hand that man a copy of Strategies, fast!