ABSTRACT
William Morris published his first experiments with fan-tasy in 1856 in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a lit-tle literary journal he and his friends-Edward Jones (Edward Burne-Jones), William Fulford, Richard Watson Dixon, Carmell Price, and Charles Faulkner-established as a public expression of artistic brotherhood. Dixon had the idea, and Morris provided the funds and served as editor of the first issue, but he quickly turned that duty over to Fulford, claiming he couldn't stand reading proofs. As its name implies, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was a college effort, and it reflected the experimentalism, intellectual energy, and creative idealism engendered through close undergraduate friendships. It is appropriate that the earliest fantasy writing was published in a university magazine. As a genre, fantasy has appealed to and nourished the experimental and idealistic minds of young people, and it was the enthusiasm of a new generation of college students committed to liberation a century later in the 1960s that turned fantasy into one of the most popular genres of fiction, beginning with the
nearly rock-star popularity on college campuses of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
