'Harry Potter', the last spell cast?: Critical reflections, July 2007
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ABSTRACT:
After ten years and 3407 pages, with the worldwide release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on 21 July 2007 the saga is at last complete, the last spell is cast, and fans and critics alike can now, dragon-like, get their teeth into the flesh of the seven-novel series without fearing J.K. Rowling will catch them out with new material that might magick away their cherished speculations. The whole phenomenon is unprecedented in the world of books. The number of people reading the seventh volume simultaneously across the planet, as if in some huge global meditation, over last week – and I was one of them – must surely have broken all simultaneous reading records. The initial print run of 12 million (compared with 1000 for the first book) was more than the population of Portugal, Joanne Rowling's onetime country of residence; the combined worldwide sales of the first six volumes, even before Deathly Hallows came out, were reported to be 325 million, or one and one-fifth times the entire population of the USA. Much has been said already about the Potter books that has become cliché and yet remains true, above all about how they have unexpectedly and triumphantly rekindled interest in the written word in today's media-savvy kids, but from now on something has changed to put the discussion on more solid foundations: we can at last meaningfully speak of something called Harry Potter, in other words, the whole chronologically evolving series of seven novels whose sequence J.K. Rowling had mapped out for herself before the first volume ever saw print. This article looks briefly at what we can now call Harry Potter, from a number of specifically literary and critical perspectives, including translation, genre and intertextuality, and with particular reference where relevant to the new, final volume.
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