‘Abandoned Boys’ and ‘Pampered Princes’: Fantasy as the Journey to Reality in the Harry Potter Sequence

Abstract

With the publication of the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter sequence, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), it is at last possible to judge not only the thematic agendas of the sequence but also its overarching narrative strategy. The early novels of the Harry Potter series were derided, among other things, for an apparent formulaic quality, effectively identified by critics such as Zipes. Not only did Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) demonstrably owe a large debt to the structure and characterisation of the conventional early twentieth-century British school story, but its two sequels, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), closely imitated the structure of the first, as Zipes has shown in some detail (Zipes, 2001, pp.176-77). To such critics as Zipes, this imitative structure made manifest the poverty of Rowling's invention and the consequent unoriginality of her writing.