James and Mendlesohn (2012) explain the fantasy genre as:;xNLx;…not so much a mansion as a row of terraces houses…with its own connecting attics, each with a door that leads to another world. There are shared walls, and a certain level of consensus around the basic bricks, but the internal décor can differ wildly, and the lives lived in these terraced houses are discrete yet overheard. (p. 1);xNLx;;xNLx;The fantasy genre exists “between the real and mythical world” (Lamb, 2015). It may involve fantastical elements in our own, real world, or it may involve an entirely different world and setting crafted by the author. Fantastical elements have existed in literature since medieval times and before, although the fantasy genre as we know was not recognized until relatively recently. Myths and legends all carry these elements, and modern fantasy is often still rooted in these stories and in medieval literature. ;xNLx;;xNLx;Wolfe (2012) places the origins of the “modern fantasy narrative” to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s essay, Biographia Literaria in which he discusses the difference between “fancy” and “imagination” (p. 9). In this essay, he debunks the idea that imagination is only memory and insists that it is actually something different, the “new embodiments of old truths” (p. 9). With this, Wolfe explains, “Coleridge’s famous distinction did much to establish the terms by which fantastic literature would be discussed for the rest of the century and give legitimacy to the notion of a vocabulary of the fantastic” (p. 9).;xNLx;;xNLx;Wolfe (2012) suggests that the fantasy genre can be traced to three different literary traditions: the “imaginary ‘private histories’” of the early novel, Gothic romance, and folk and fairy tales (p.12). Fairy tales became popular during the late 17th century, but began to develop further during the 19th century, after the Romantic and Victorian movements (Wolfe, 2012, p. 12). By the late 19th century, children’s fantasy had become popular, but adult fantasy mainly existed only in other forms, such as ghost stories, orientalism, and Gothic novels. ;xNLx;;xNLx;William Morris, according to Wolfe (2012) was the first in the 19th century to revive medieval romance and create his own stories in his own fictitious worlds. More familiar names today, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were influenced by Morris to write fantasy novels that we recognize as such today.;xNLx;References;xNLx;;xNLx;Ashliman, D. L. (2013). Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales. FolkTexts. Retrieved from http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault.html.;xNLx;James, E. and Mendleson, F. (2012). Introduction. E. James & F. Mendlesohn (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (pp. 1-4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ;xNLx;Lawall, S. (Ed.). (1984) Beowulf. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. (pp. 1174-1247). New York: Norton.;xNLx;Wolfe, G. K. (2012). Fantasy from Dryden to Duseny. E. James & F. Mendlesohn (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (pp. 7-20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ;xNLx;Tolkien, J. R. R. (1997). The Silmarillion. New York: Hougton Mifflin.