2.1 Harry Potter’s Writing Background
Joanne Kathleen Rowling, better known by the androgynous initials J.k’, was born in Chipping near Bristol in the southwest England on July 31,1965,the same day as her famous boy—wizard hero Harry. Rowling read often as a child and many of her happiest memories concerned reading and writing According to the interviews, she admired the works of writers such as E Nesbit, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Goodge, Paul Galileo, and Noel Stratified, among others. Besides, C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books are also admired by Rowling as the early influences that led her to write children’s books. Rowling wrote her first” book”, a story about a rabbit with measles called Rabbit and a giant bee called Miss Bee when she was only about five or six years old. At Exeter University Rowling took her degree in French and spent one year studying in Paris.
After college, she moved to London to work for Amnesty International as a researcher and bilingual secretary. According to the reviews from Literature Online Biography, Rowling began writing the first Harry Potter book in the summer of 1990 after her sudden revelation on the train from Manchester to London.
By the time the train pulled into King’s Cross Station, many of the characters and the early stages of the plot had been formed in her mind. Rowling had been writing short stories and working on two novels, but these were promptly abandoned for the story of Harry Potter.
In 1992, Rowling moved to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. She enjoyed teaching, and as she worked in the afternoons and evenings, the mornings were free for her writing. However, after her marriage to a Portuguese journalist ended in porce, Rowling returned to Britain with her infant dual gather and a suitcase full of papers covered with stories about Harry Potter. As a straggling single mother living on the dole in a small Edinburgh flat, Rowling continued to write the Harry Potter stories on scraps of paper in one of her local cafes and eventually completed the first book in 1996.
In recent years, Harry Potter has aroused more and more attention of the literary scholars and critics throughout the world. It has been making its way into the world of literary criticism. To date, scholars and experts have begun to go deep into this phenomenon and dedicated to more rational anatomy and annotation of the Harry Potter novels from a broad range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology, culture, sociology, pedagogy and so on.
Besides, in his article The Cultural Expatiation of Harry Potter Phenomenon, Professor Ye Shuxian, the domestic distinguished multidisciplinary scholar in the fields of anthropology as well as in literature and culture, points out that the Success of Harry Potter profits from the author’s extraordinary imagination, which can also be attributed to the fantasy effect of magic.
2.2 Harry Potter’s theme
The Harry Potter stories have quickly attained unprecedented popularity and been critically acclaimed in Britain and the United States immediately after the first publication. Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone published in the U.S.A. As Harry Potter and the Sorcerer bone, the first book of the Harry Potter series, has won the 1997 British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year, the 1998 New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, the 1998 Sheffield Children’s Book Award, and the 1998 Parenting magazine Book of the Year, Award. It was named” one of the best books of 1998” by Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklet in the United States. Meanwhile the author J.K Rowling was awarded as the winner of the Gold Medal Smartest Prize for three years in a row and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in early 2001 for her contributions to children’s literature.
The Harry Potter books are about an unwanted, orphaned child(a“ Cinder lad”, as Alison Lurie of Harvard University calls Harry Potter who accidentally finds out that he is a wizard with magical powers. On his eleventh birthday, Hazy learns about the secret of his parents’ death, the existence of an archenemy named Lord Voldemort, and his unexpected enrollment at Hogwarts, a boarding school for wizards. Before Rowling finished the first book, she had conceived the Harry Potter stories as a seven-volume series, with each book chronicling one year of Harry’s initiatory ordeals at Hogwarts School. As she said in an interview, “I decided that it would take seven years, from the ages of eleven to seventeen, inclusive, to train as a wizard, and each of the books would deal with a year of Harry’s life at Hogwarts. Since the success of the first novel, Rowling has published five sequels up to date: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and order of Phoenix, and Harry Potter and the Blood Prince. In her books. J.k Rowling looks at the world diagonally and sees its magic. 《哈利•波特》小说中的希腊神话原型分析(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_5785.html