Reading Intertextuality. The Natural and the Legitimate: Intertextuality in ‘Harry Potter’

Abstract

Intertextuality is still a contentious notion, not only within children’s literature criticism but also within criticism overall. If we look at a text which has recently been at the center of the children’s literature world, J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, we can see how the question of intertextuality mediates core preoccupations about literary value, originality, and authority. Harry Potter is often claimed in journalism and criticism alike to have been a completely spontaneous phenomenon, the offspring of J.K. Rowling’s sudden inspiration during a train journey in times of hardship. In the spate of recent criticism on the series, however, many scholars have linked the texts either to specific works of children’s literature, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to The Worst Witch, or to genres (especially the boarding school story) or to myths and fairy tales. Harry Potter, then, is claimed to be both utterly original and part of a literary lineage. Julia Eccleshare, for instance, provides a list of literary parallels:

Physically, with its dramatic setting and castle-like appearance, Hogwarts owes much to the cliff-top Roslyn in Dean Farrer’s classic Eric, or Little by Little (1858) as well as to Blyton’s altogether jollier ‘Malory Towers’ stories. […] The village of Hogsmeade […] mirrors the pub life in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays. […] Just as Jennings befriends Darbishire when they both arrive at Linbury Court Preparatory School in Anthony Buckerige’s Jennings Goes to School (1950), […] so Harry and Ron become instant friends when they meet on the Hogwarts Express […].²

No man can write a single passage to which a parallel one may not be found somewhere in the literature of the world.

Alfred Tennyson¹