Abstract
Apart from the genre of ‘children’s literature’, the Harry Potter books are also often located in the genre of ‘fantasy literature’. Literary critics have been attentive to the nuances of ‘fantasy literature’ as a genre in two ways: either by attempting to describe its formal and thematic characteristics (there is a longish tradition of this), or by attempting to locate and understand ‘fantasy literature’ in terms of social and political environments and effects (a relative recent tendency). The latter is naturally of greater interest in this essay and this chapter is largely devoted to that. Only brief consideration is given here, therefore, to the status of the Harry Potter books as ‘fantasy literature’ in a formal or thematic fashion.
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Notes
W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 9.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 3–4.
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© 2009 Suman Gupta
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Gupta, S. (2009). Fantasy Literature. In: Re-Reading Harry Potter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230279711_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230279711_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-21958-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-27971-1
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