User:AleatoryPonderings/Rowling literary analysis

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Literary work[edit]

Harry Potter[edit]

Main article: Harry Potter

The Harry Potter series, particularly following the release of Prisoner of Azkaban in September 1999 and Goblet of Fire on 8 July 2000, has enjoyed enormous commercial success and attention from academic critics.[1] It was adapted into the Harry Potter film series, whose first instalment was released in 2001;[2] and its books have been translated into at least 60 languages.[3] The series has also come in for sustained opposition, particularly by Christian groups who claim that the books promote witchcraft.[4] In late 1999, writer Nancy Stouffer sued Rowling for copyright infringement.[5]

Critics have identified themes including death, truth, love, and power in the series, and noted its blend of ordinary objects and people with supernatural elements and magic. Rowling herself has identified her prime literary inspiration as Jane Austen, while critics have noted allusions to the Western classics and the influence of juvenile fantasy writers including C. S. Lewis.

Themes[edit]

Harry Potter has been understood as a fairy tale, a Bildungsroman, and a work about the characters' education.[6] According to A. S. Byatt, Harry is a simplistic work that reflects a dumbed-down culture dominated by soap operas and reality television.[6] Joan Acocella sees power as the series's central theme.[7] Truth is thematised through Harry's willingness to lie and the gradual process by which his family history comes to light.[8] Death is likewise foregrounded through the frequent deaths of characters in Harry's life and his confrontation with his own mortality in Deathly Hallows.[9] Rowling has described "death and bereavement" as "one of the central themes in all seven books" of the series.[10] Critic Rita Singer, drawing on a theory originally articulated on MuggleNet, views the series as a Christian moral fable evoking the psychomachia tradition, in which stand-ins for good and evil fight for supremacy over a person's soul.[11] Joy Farmer sees numerous parallels between The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, arguing—contrary to the views of critics including Pharr—that Harry Potter is suffused with Christian allegory.[12]

Characters in the series, even the intellectual Hermione Granger, seldom consider the philosophical or ethical implications of their actions directly.[13] Moral questions are addressed through personal emotions and not intellectual consideration. Critic Lakshmi Chaudhry sees this as an aspect of the series's "moral fuzziness", whereas Mary Pharr argues that the absence of moral clarity derives from Harry Potter's postmodernism—in the postmodern world, there are no moral absolutes.[14]

Farah Mendlesohn views Harry Potter as conventional in its political outlook. Despite being a work of fantasy, she argues, Harry Potter does not see anything wrong with the status quo of liberalism in the United Kingdom. Therefore, according to Mendlesohn, this leads to a "rejection of the subversive opportunities available to the fantasist".[15]

Influences[edit]

Rowling has described Jane Austen as her "favourite author of all time",[16] and acknowledges Homer, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare as literary influences.[17] According to critic Beatrice Groves, Harry Potter is "rooted in the Western literary tradition", including the classics.[18] Scholars agree that Harry Potter is heavily influenced by the juvenile fantasy of writers such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Elizabeth Goudge, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dianna Wynne Jones, and E. Nesbit.[19]

Characters[edit]

Critics Katrin Berndt and Lena Steveker argue Harry Potter is a hero, but of a different sort than previous heroes in literature. Instead of male heroes who appear in older literary genres such as epic and romance, who are defined by moral qualities such as courage and valiance, they argue, Harry's heroism is based on "sympathy and compassion".[20] Michiko Kakutani considers the Harry Potter series an epic in which Harry confronts questions including personal independence and free will.[21]

Mary Pharr casts Harry as an "epic hero for the postmodern world" because he acts based on empathy for others as opposed to a moral code or religious doctrine.[22] As opposed to Tom Riddle, who becomes Lord Voldemort, Harry typically acts through empathy toward others despite personal risk.[21] According to John Granger, the series reflects a moral sensibility of political correctness in that the protagonists oppose prejudice.[23] The role of love, for Granger, is a central theme in Harry Potter and a dividing line between Harry and Voldemort: Harry is a hero because he loves others; Voldemort is a villain because he does not.[24]

The Great Snape Debate, a book-length collection of essays assessing the character Severus Snape, appeared in 2007. The book is divided into two sections, written by the same authors, in which Snape is alternately praised and critiqued.[25] Alison Lurie, among other critics, has noted how the names of Rowling's characters typically evoke their personalities.[26][27]

Ordinary and extraordinary[edit]

Critic Lisa Hopkins views heroism, for Rowling, as something within reach for "ordinary people".[16] Like heroes highlighted through aristeias in the Iliad, she suggests, individual characters in Harry Potter can each have their moment in the sun.[28] Roni Natov likewise emphasizes the way magic renders everyday objects, such as paintings, books, and candy, extraordinary.[26] Eva Oppermann, following Michel Foucault, terms the blending of natural and supernatural settings in Harry Potter a heterotopia.[29] Taking a negative view of Rowling's blend of the ordinary and extraordinary, John Pennington argues that Harry Potter is a "failed fantasy" because it does not depart sufficiently from everyday, unmagical life.[30]

Legacy[edit]

Harry Potter has been credited with revolutionising the landscape of children's literature. It led the New York Times to create a separate children's bestseller list, whose purpose, according to scholars Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, was to save adult novels from "the embarrassment of being outdone by a children's book".[31] Due to its commercial success, fantasy became a dominant genre in the children's market, a sea change from its declining status in the 1980s.[32] A number of older works in the genre, from authors such as Diana Wynne Jones and Jane Yolen, saw reprints and increased popularity as a result; some authors were able to re-establish their careers.[33] In the decades following Harry Potter, a large number of imitators, as well as subversive responses, also became popular.[34]

According to Rowling, Harry Potter fandom was a "global phenomenon".[6] Levy and Mendlesohn attribute this success to a number of factors: the endearing nature of Rowling's characters, the nostalgia of the boarding-school story, and the accessibility of her books in terms of prose and plot to non-readers. They also credit her simple themes that were "not too challenging to the young (or adult) reader’s intellect", in contrast to more complex ideas in the works of Le Guin and Yolen.[35] Critic Tammy Turner-Vorbeck analyses Harry Potter's cultural impact, sometimes called "Pottermania", with a neo-Marxist perspective. She argues that Pottermania has contributed to the commercialisation of childhood.[36]

Other work[edit]

Beyond Harry Potter, Rowling has published The Casual Vacancy (2012) and Cormoran Strike, a series of murder mysteries released under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Neither has been as well received as Harry Potter.[37]

Casual Vacancy is set in Pagford, a village in the West Country, after the death of village councillor Barry Fairbrother. The main controversy in Pagford concerns whether the town will keep the Fields, a housing estate, within its municipal boundaries. Pro- and anti-Fields contingents emerge among the candidates for Fairbrother's seat and the candidates' children wreak havoc, revealing salacious secrets hidden from public view.[38][39] Casual Vacancy combines comedy with tragedy. Its publisher promoted the novel as as a black comedy, while critic Ian Parker described it in The New Yorker as a "rural comedy of manners".[40][41] Critic Tison Pugh, and Rowling herself, describe the novel as a contemporary take on 19th-century British fiction examining village life such as Austen's novels and George Eliot's Middlemarch; the latter inspired "Mugglemarch", the title of Parker's New Yorker review.[42][40] The novel received some positive, some middling, and some negative reviews.[43]

Pugh classes Cormoran Strike as hardboiled detective fiction.[44] The eponymous protagonist is a private investigator in his mid-thirties who grows to depend on Robin Venetia Ellacott, a younger woman who works for him. Cormoran, unfriendly and sometimes oblivious, nonetheless acts with a deep moral sensibility.[45] In the series's five novels, the first of which was released in 2013,[46] Ellacott and Cormoran investigate grisly murders including that of Owen Quine, the victim in The Silkworm (2014), whose corpse is served as dinner.[47] Critics have spoken well of the Strike series, even as some note that the plots are occasionally contrived.[48]

Citations[edit]

  1. ^ Whited 2002, pp. 1–2, 6.
  2. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 4.
  3. ^ Heilman 2008, p. 1.
  4. ^ Whited 2002, pp. 3–4.
  5. ^ Whited 2002, p. 4.
  6. ^ a b c Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 10.
  7. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 18.
  8. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 19–20.
  9. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 20–21.
  10. ^ Farmer 2001, p. 55.
  11. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 26–27.
  12. ^ Farmer 2001, p. 58f.
  13. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 15.
  14. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 18–19.
  15. ^ Mendlesohn 2001, p. 287.
  16. ^ a b Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 55.
  17. ^ Groves 2017, p. xiii.
  18. ^ Groves 2017, pp. x, xii.
  19. ^ Groves 2017, p. xii.
  20. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 1–2.
  21. ^ a b Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 13.
  22. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 9.
  23. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 12.
  24. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, pp. 14–15.
  25. ^ Heilman 2008, p. 84.
  26. ^ a b Natov 2001, p. 315.
  27. ^ Lurie, Alison (16 December 1999). "Not for Muggles". The New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2022-01-04.
  28. ^ Berndt & Steveker 2016, p. 65.
  29. ^ Oppermann 2018, pp. 402–403.
  30. ^ Pennington 2002, pp. 79–80.
  31. ^ Levy & Mendlesohn 2016, p. 165.
  32. ^ Levy & Mendlesohn 2016, pp. 161–165.
  33. ^ Levy & Mendlesohn 2016, p. 167.
  34. ^ Levy & Mendlesohn 2016, pp. 170.
  35. ^ Levy & Mendlesohn 2016, p. 166, 168−169.
  36. ^ Heilman 2008, p. 331.
  37. ^ Pugh 2020, pp. 107–108.
  38. ^ Pugh 2020, pp. 108–109.
  39. ^ Marchand, Philip (2012-09-27). "Open Book: The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling". National Post. Retrieved 2022-01-05.
  40. ^ a b Parker, Ian (2012-09-24). "Mugglemarch". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2022-01-05.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  41. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 110.
  42. ^ Pugh 2020, pp. 114–115.
  43. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 115.
  44. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 116.
  45. ^ Pugh 2020, pp. 117–118.
  46. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 5.
  47. ^ Pugh 2020, p. 119.
  48. ^ Pugh 2020, pp. 122–123.

Works cited[edit]

Further reading[edit]

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