In her follow-up to The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, Lana A. Whited has compiled a new collection of essays analyzing the books, films, and other media by J. K. Rowling. This includes pieces on the Harry Potter books and movies, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (films), The Cursed Child (play), as well as her writing outside the wizarding universe, such as The Ickabog, The Casual Vacancy, and the Cormoran Strike series. Many of the chapters explore works that influenced the Harry Potter series, including Classical epic, Shakespearian comedy and tragedy, and Arthurian myth. In addition to literary comparison, the volume delves into topics like political authoritarianism, distrust of the media, racial and social justice, and developments in fandom. It’s fair to say that much has changed in regard to Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling scholarship in the twenty years since the first volume’s publication. While it was once considered a universally beloved book series, the relationship between HP and its fans has grown more complicated in recent years. As its readers have grown older and Rowling’s reputation has wavered in the public eye, Whited and her contributors consider the complicated legacy of Harry Potter and its author and explore how the series will evolve in the next twenty years.

Potterversity: Essays Exploring the World of Harry Potter presents a written companion to the popular, "Hermione-Approved" MuggleNet podcast by the same name. Selected from the top Potter Studies scholars in the field, the diverse authors in the volume provide a range of interpretations of wizarding world stories. Essays include analysis of genre conventions, literary and religious symbolism, the role of games in the series, pedagogical approaches, and politically challenging issues like U.S. race relations, colonialism, and gender and sexuality--including direct attention to J.K. Rowling's controversial statements about trans people. Grouped into the sections "Occult Knowledge," "Ancient Magic," "A Question of Character," "Self and Other," "Playing Potter," and "Teaching, the Hogwarts Way," partnered essays precede transcripts of podcast conversations, led by the hosts of Potterversity. The book's essays and conversations aim to engage not only the mind but the spirit as well--the emotional, personal, and moral responses the Potterverse has evoked in so many people around the world. Fundamentally, this book demonstrates that the characters, stories, and situations of the magical realm promote thinking that helps us navigate our more mundane but no less dangerous world. Perhaps even more importantly, they help us to recognize the magic amid our everyday Muggle realities.

Now available in paper, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter is the first book-length analysis of J. K. Rowling's work from a broad range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. A significant portion of the book explores the Harry Potter series' literary ancestors, including magic and fantasy works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Monica Furlong, Jill Murphy, and others, as well as previous works about the British boarding school experience. Other chapters explore the moral and ethical dimensions of Harry's world, including objections to the series raised within some religious circles. In her new epilogue, Lana A. Whited brings this volume up to date by covering Rowling's latest book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

This is an essential text for primary trainees and teachers. While the focus in early reading is on systematic synthetic phonics, it is important to see the bigger picture and understand that teaching reading is a continuum that involves more much than the mechanics of reading. The book focuses on a range of issues to develop children who can read into children who do read, including extending reading with proficient readers, engaging disengaged readers, sustaining interest in reading in the transition from primary to secondary, and the importance of oracy in reading. Additionally, there is an exploration of the wider context of reading including international perspectives, new literacies and the importance of reading to personal development. Case studies and activities demonstrate practical applications with clear links to the underpinning theory, while critical reflections challenge the reader and encourage deeper thought about the chapter content.

Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. This volume proposes a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. By making place studies a guiding principle, this book builds on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture to bring together and provide a comprehensive overview of how to study place in children’s and young adult literature. This volume provides a wide range of approaches and international perspectives of place in children’s literature, media, and culture and contributes to this growing and relevant field by showcasing various scholarly aspects and approaches to children’s literature, and the place of children’s literature in the context of international scholarship.

Over the past few decades there have been intense debates in education surrounding children’s literacy achievement and ways to promote reading, particularly that of boys. The Harry Potter book series has been received enthusiastically by very many children, boys and girls alike, but has also been constructed in popular and media discourses as a children’s, particularly a boys’, literacy saviour. Children’s Literacy Practices and Preferences: Harry Potter and Beyond provides empirical evidence of young people’s reported literacy practices and views on reading, and of how they see how the Harry Potter series as having impacted their own literacy. The volume explores and debunks some of the myths surrounding Harry Potter and literacy, and contextualizes these within children’s wider reading.

The Year's Work in Medievalism: 2004 is based upon but not restricted to the 2004 proceedings of the annual International Conference on Medievalism, organized by the Director of Conferences for Studies in Medievalism, Gwendolyn Morgan, and, for 2004, Christa Canitz of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. The essays of the current volume center on the question of individual responsibility in humanizing one's society through the use of medievalism. - Gwendolyn A. Morgan, "Medievalism and Individual Responsibility" - Karl Fugelso, "Defining Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Commedia Illustrations" - Renee Ward, "Remus Lupin and Community: The Werewolf Tradition in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series. - Nancy M. Thompson, Architectural Restoriation and Stained Glass in 19th-Century Siena: The Place of Light in Giuseppe Partini's Purismo - Barbara Gribling, Nationalism and the Image of the Black Prince - Clare A. Simmons, Small-Scale Humor in the British Medieval Revival - Brian C. Johnsrud, "The Monsters Do Not Depart": Re-Unifying Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Christian in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - Jaimie Hensley, J.R.R. Tolkien and Walther von der Volgelweide: Faerie and Reality - Peter G. Christensen, From Waste Land to Grail and Back Again Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous

The Harry Potter phenomenon created a surge in reading with a lasting effect on all areas of culture, especially education. Today, teachers across the world are harnessing the power of the series to teach history, gender studies, chemistry, religion, philosophy, sociology, architecture, Latin, medieval studies, astronomy, SAT skills, and much more. These essays discuss the diverse educational possibilities of J.K. Rowling's books. Teachers of younger students use Harry and Hermione to encourage kids with disabilities or show girls the power of being brainy scientists. Students are reading fanfiction, splicing video clips, or exploring Rowling's new website, Pottermore. Harry Potter continues to open new doors to learning.

Given the current educational climate of high stakes testing, standardized curriculum, and 'approved' reading lists, incorporating unauthorized, popular literature into the classroom becomes a political choice. The authors examine why teachers choose to read Harry Potter , how they use the books, and the resulting teacher-student interactions.

This book examines the use of myth in contemporary popular and high culture, and proposes that the aporetic subject, the individual that ‘does not know’, is the ideal contemporary subject. Using several contemporary novels, films and theatrical plays that illustrate aporia – such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan, 2007), Tron Legacy (Koninski, 2010), Welcome to Thebes (Buffini, 2010), The Photographers (Koundouros, 1998), Prometheus (2012) and Prometheus Retrogressing (Sfikas, 1998) – Angie Voela introduces common ground between Lacanian psychoanalysis and some of Freud’s most ardent critics, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, as well as the cultural philosopher Bernard Stiegler. These unprecedented systematic comparisons broaden the scope and impact of Lacanian psychoanalysis in inter-disciplinary debates of philosophy and culture and Voela argues that apart from dealing with the past, psychoanalysis must also deal more explicitly with the present and the future. She presents a unique inquiry into modern subjectivity that will be of great interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film, literature and contemporary culture.