Children’s Literature and Harry Potter

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• Children’s Literature and Harry Potter: How far J. K. Rowling does transcend the canonical confines of children’s literature and claims the heights of ‘real’ literature?

                                                         

                                                        Children literature have characteristics like Concept of childhood, Action, Innocence, Fantastic, optimism, illustration, Children’s rights movements and all these and many other characteristics one can find in Harry Potter series of books. J. K. Rowling has done fantastic job. Readers grows with the Harry and His task becomes readers quest to solve the Riddle or find the ultimate solution. 

                                                       “ Potter changed everything. Suddenly, publishers woke up to the idea that children’s literature was not something that was just read by children, but – crucially – was read by everyone. And the children who grew up reading Harry Potter went on to read children’s books as adults, which is one of the reasons the children’s market is seeing such huge growth.”

                                                         Yet Rowling’s books cannot comfortably be classified as adult literature, or at least it seems that to categorize Harry Potter in this way is too threatening to the status quo of what can be considered “serious” literature or high art. It is so intimidating, in fact, that in the year 2000 The New York Times famously created a separate category for best-selling works of children’s literature, unwilling to allow Rowling’s novels to continue their seventy-nine week run on the best-seller list. “The time has come,” declared Charles McGrath, editor of the Book Review, “when we need to clear some room,” and thus the new “Children’s Book” list replaced “Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” at the bottom of the hardcover page.3 For the most part, publishers and booksellers advocated this change, “complaining that a cluster of popular children’s books can keep deserving adult books off the list.”4 To those who protested this new categorization, arguing that, after all, adults read Harry Potter, too, McGrath’s response was: “if another ‘Harry Potter’ came along, even if it were only on the children’s list, if it were a true crossover book, it would be noticed” by the public. “Being on the kids’ best-seller list wouldn’t ghettoize it,” he claimed. Perhaps McGrath was correct in terms of popularity and book sales.

                                                           One of the radical things about the Potter books was the idea of the hero growing older as the series progressed,” says Cunningham, who now heads the children’s publisher Chicken House. “Twenty years ago, that was very unusual, and it enabled the books to address much wider issues, which children’s fiction in the past might have skirted. The Potter books may have been fantasy, but what they really did was to bring children’s books into the land of emotional realism.”


                                                      In seven book, one story of Harry grows child to teen age and His mental grown up, his maturity reflects at every stage. Thus, he fit info the definition of hero, who sacrifice for other and have great chivalry. His virtue wind over vices and it teach lesson of morality.



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• References:-

1. http://reenakhastiya.blogspot.com/2019/03/harry-potter-and-children-literature.html
2. http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/97/82%26lt%3B
3. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/17467335/MATTSON-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y

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