Two ideas about fantasy literature:
Ross Douthat: “Fantasy as created and consumed in the English-speaking world is strongly associated with the Northern European past…since the fantasy genre is concerned with the transition from the premodern to the modern, the enchanted to the disenchanted.”
Ursula Le Guin: “The great fantasies, myths and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious–symbol and archetype.”
Le Guin suggests a perennial tension between conscious & unconscious & Douthat a distinctly modern problem of disenchantment. But if disenchantment is (in part) a flattening of experience, in which matters (e.g. unconscious experience) not amenable to quantification or commodification or technical manipulation are displaced or disregarded, then the two perspectives aren’t contradictory. In which case the association of fantasy literature with the past is incidental, not essential.