A theoretical critique of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series

Abstract

Every once in a while, someone comes along and takes the world by storm. This holds true of a skinny spectacled boy with green eyes and a lightning scar on his forehead who first appeared on June 26, 1997. This boy, Harry Potter, captivated a generation of readers and turned them into believers. The success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series is not out of luck. It is not because of marketing or popularity. It has immense literary credit as well. This paper is an attempt to analyse J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series as a literary text. In this paper, the researcher proposes the elucidation of literary theoretical concepts like Sign, Langue and Parole, Plot Structure, Binary Opposition, Deconstruction, Narratology, Todorov’s three-part narrative structure, Simulacrum, Marxist concepts, Freud’s concept of Personality, Psyche and Feminism in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series. This paper is thus proposed as a theoretical critique of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.