In large part, that boom is courtesy of Harry Potter , which became a surprise crossover hit adored by both children and adults, and which made it acceptable for adults to read books that are ostensibly for children. But there are plenty of reasons for a grown person to enjoy Harry Potter. The Harry Potter books combine the intricate plotting of a mystery with the sweep and scope of epic fantasy and the intimacy and character development of a classic boarding school narrative.
The result is purely pleasurable to read at any age: The puzzlebox mystery plotting keeps the pages turning propulsively forward, the fantastic mythology gives the world scope and magic and joy, and the boarding school structure makes the characters warm and familiar and charming. It also makes their eventual death for some and trauma for all deeply affecting. But if you are an adult who can imagine reading for more than one reason the pleasures of story, the joy of immersing yourself in another world , the Harry Potter books become enormously appealing.
Part of what made Harry Potter such a literary phenomenon is that so many kids were reading the books despite an unprecedented number of attempts to get them to stop reading the books. The Harry Potter series, like many works of fantasy, involves wizardry and witchcraft.
Rowling retroactively outed the powerful wizard Dumbledore as gay. Here are just two of the ways Harr y Potter changed publishing, and how those changes affected the rest of pop culture:.
Their parents were paying for everything, and they would never be willing to pay an extra dollar or two for a longer book, with its extra printing and binding. But after Harry Potter became an unstoppable cultural force, and it was clear that fans would keep buying the books no matter what, it started to expand.
The last four volumes of the series are all doorstoppers that clock in at well over pages each. Booklist found that middle-grade novels expanded They rose only Sales were falling. In , in the midst of the Harry Potter phenomenon, sales of non-Potter kid lit were increasing by 2 percent a year. For comparison, the overall book market has gone up a mere 33 percent since The Harry Potter generation likes to read, for sure — millennials read more than any other generation — and it also created a cultural landscape in which books for children are major cultural forces, and a go-to well of ideas for Hollywood.
We apprehend the theme by inference — it is the rationale of the images and symbols, not their quantity. Thus, a theme is a comprehensible viewpoint that emerges from a pattern of recurrence — a statement, if you will, that we perceive through progressive repetition and associated symbolism.
Without that statement, a pattern is just a motif. If the author is using that pattern to say something, however, the pattern becomes a theme. At the end of that story, Harry is only able to obtain the stone from the Mirror of Erised because he does not want to use it.
This contrast is again the pivot-point of the mortality theme that Rowling develops. Where would Harry — or anyone in the magic world — be without them? He never could have fought that final battle alone, without his amazing community of bad-ass wizards to back him up. You might not have a group of wizards for support, but you can always reach out to your community of friends and family if you need help. Harry taught us to never give up.
He destroyed the horcrux within himself, and then came back from the dead to kill Voldemort. Harry endured so much in the series, and he persevered through all of it. He showed us that you can push through even the hardest times, bounce back and succeed. Who would have thought that Snape would turn out to be a huge help to Harry? Remember that there are a lot of avenues for getting help. The one he was most well known for, and the first he received, was on his forehead and was shaped like a lightning bolt possibly the shape of the wand movement required for the killing curse ; it was the result of a Killing Curse striking him when he was an infant, and played a role in his conflict with, and eventual defeat of, Lord Voldemort.
A scar on Harry Potter 's forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt [5] was the result of a failed murder attempt by Lord Voldemort on 31 October , when he struck month-old Harry with the Killing Curse. The scar on Harry's forehead prompted his enemy Draco Malfoy to come up with and use the mocking nickname of "Scarhead" for Harry, which he first uttered during the Quidditch match of Gryffindor vs Slytherin in , [9] and used multiple times afterwards too.
In the years to come, Harry's scar hurt whenever Voldemort was close, or whenever he was in danger from the Dark Lord or his followers, the Death Eaters , such as when one set off the Dark Mark near him in When Harry was forced to confront the newly returned Voldemort in the graveyard in Little Hangleton in , his scar burned terribly. At this point, it became clear to Albus Dumbledore and to Harry that the scar was part of a link between his mind and that of Voldemort.
It would hurt Harry whenever Voldemort was experiencing strong negative emotions, and sometimes Harry was able to see into Voldemort's thoughts directly. This incident was what highlighted the need for Harry to learn to block the connection that existed, as this vision was more intense then previous ones. To try to prevent Voldemort from invading Harry's mind, Dumbledore had him take Occlumency lessons with Severus Snape , [11] though they were ultimately unsuccessful, because Snape and Harry could not put their animosity towards each other aside and perform the necessary steps required in teaching and learning this art.
In June , Voldemort used the link to send Harry a false vision of his godfather being tortured with the Cruciatus Curse in order to lure him to the Department of Mysteries. Although Harry never mastered Occlumency , he did eventually learn to exert moderate control over the connection between himself and Voldemort. While searching for the Horcruxes with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger , he felt his scar burn many times, on the occasions when Voldemort was angry, and was able to glimpse his thoughts and perceptions at those times.
0コメント