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With the remarkable 3.5 million first printing of Harry and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth volume in the series, thirty-seven-year-old Joanna Kathleen Rowling has achieved the dream of every adult or children's author: people everywhere are buying, reading, writing, and talking about Harry You don't have be a wizard or a kid, says columnist Cathy Hainer in USA Today, to appreciate the spell cast by Harry Potter. Roger Sutton, editor of one of the best-known journals in the field of children's literature, Hornbook Magazine, rained on Rowling's parade by judging the first book critically insignificant (500), but sales of the first four novels--Harry and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), Harry and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), Harry and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), and Harry and the Goblet of Fire (2000)--have earned their author over $30 million date (Abanes 8n2). Her American publisher, Scholastic Inc., has made more than that, already as much as $200 million according some estimates (Abanes 2), and will make even more when the remaining three novels are published in 2002 and 2003. Who could have predicted that Rowling, a single mother on welfare, would produce the `cash cow' (qtd. in Sokoloff) or, as others have said, the golden goose of the century (Maslin), inspiring a huge industry in everything from lunch boxes and beach towels coloring books and jelly beans? And, since she recently sold the film rights for the complete series Warner Brothers, the first film, Harry and the Sorcerer's Stone, earning $31.3 million on the first day, with ABC picking up the television rights in a deal estimated at $140 million, there no doubt will be more products come (Abramowitz and Day). Meanwhile Rowling has toured the United States and Europe, been on dozens of talk shows, and was even invited Buckingham Palace, where she received the Order of the British Empire (Soares). By any estimate this first-time author has made a significant contribution the field of children's literature. In questioning the critical significance of Harry Potter, Sutton perhaps means imply that these books, while wildly popular with the masses, are not be read or taken seriously by scholars. Some scholars, however, are taking them seriously. Nicholas Tucker's The Rise and Rise of Harry Potter in Children's Literature in Education contextualizes Rowling's work within the fairy-tale tradition. popularity of Rowling's determinedly old-fashioned (222) fairy tale suggests that modern children and their parents are tired of contemporary realism in children's fiction--stories about drugs, alcohol, divorce, and sex, none of which appear so far in the series. What we have instead is a distinctly backward-looking fantasy of the children's boarding-school variety that, according Tucker, caters the escapist dreams of anyone who ever went school and didn't like it. Harry contains melodrama, moral certainty, and agreeable wish fulfillment, which makes it but not great literature (228). Still, we should not write off the series altogether because three titles remain. Perhaps it will get better. Feminist critic Deborah Thompson loves the series but cautions against unbridled adulation because, despite the cute fun and the magic, Harry contains gendered images more common the mid-twentieth century than the twenty-first (42). Boy wizards like Harry have all the fun while girl wizards like his friend, Hermione, mope around, nag, or go the library. Children's fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes agrees. fantasy world in Harry is not skeptical enough about the original messages of conventional fairy tales, which, claims Zipes, were sexist and patriarchal. Like all the other one-dimensional good characters in the story, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger circle around Harry with his phallic wand in order highlight his extraordinary role as Boy Scout/detective (180). …
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