Guide to the Harry Potter Novels

Description

J.K. Rowling is half-way through a series which has taken the world by storm. Unusually, she has attracted success both in terms of massive sales figures and critical acclaim. This study looks at her books and considers some of the reasons for their phenomenal success. This is done against a background of how Harry Potter relates to other contemporary children's books so that students and teachers can place them in the context for which they were written. The underlying thesis is: when J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter title and planned the rest, she drew on her considerable experience as a reader and, through her powers of story telling, created a world of her own. What was initially imitative has, with her gaining confidence, become witty pastiche (or, as it was recently described, intertextuality). This, combined with an unusual ability to tell a long story and to keep up a flow of creative invention, has enabled her to create four absorbing novels that have given story telling a good name for adults and children alike.

Julia Eccleshare is children's books editor of the Guardian (one of the UK's top broadsheets). She has written on children's books for 25 years and regularly appears on BBC programmes and in "The Bookseller". One of her reviews provided blurb for the first paperback edition of "Harry Potter".

"a thoughtful introduction to the phenomenon that began in 1997 with the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" --Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Winter 02-03 "Overall, this useful text serves its purpose by providing a launching point for parents and high school teachers. It may even serve some use as supplementary reading for Children's or Young Adult literature courses focused on the Potter books."- Brent Stypczynski, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Summer 2006, 17.2 -- International Association for the Fantastic Arts "Without pretension, she reminds us of how useful it is to stand back from the razzmatazz of book reading and selling and library works and the rest, to take stock of what makes Harry Potter books tick... Eccleshare opens up a number of critical ideas that are always worth asking... She combines "conventionality with traditionalism" and so makes a suitable case for treatment by Olympian critics keen to detect sources, devise theories and distrust commercialism. I hope Eccleshare rewrites the book now that the Harry Potter series is complete." Stuart Hannabuss, LR 57,8 'Eccleshare addresses pertinent race and gender issues, examines Rowling's handling of education and the family, and touches on some broad social implications of current widespread enthusiasm for Harry Potter.' * Modern Literature *