Magic in the Air

This article considers the Harry Potter phenomenon in terms both of its contemporary significance and the debates surrounding the status of children's literature as literature. It also sets the stories themselves within traditions in children's literature, where orphans and schools and magic may work as they do in these novels to expunge with parents any class or geographical specificity from the worlds they inhabit. Finally, the work is looked at in the context of magic and the realism of a writer like James Hogg in the early nineteenth century.