La Trobe

Equalizing Time: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as a Retrospective and Prospective Adaptation

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posted on 2025-06-30, 06:21 authored by Karen Keane
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child poses interesting questions for fans and scholars of the whole Harry Potter series about the effects of adaptations on re-reads, as well as the ability of works to stand alone. This stage adaptation, by Jack Thorne, John Tiffany, and J. K. Rowling, possesses a unique status as both a Retrospective Adaptation, which rewards readers for their prior knowledge about the series, and as a Prospective Adaptation, which leads audiences to the source series. Thus, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child can be read as a stand-alone text since it requires no prior knowledge to navigate, but can also fit seamlessly into the full sequence of the Potter stories.

History

Journal

The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's Literature

ISSN

1551-5680

Volume

22

Issue

1

Publisher

La Trobe University

Section Title

Emerging Voices

Author Biography

Karyn Keane is a senior at Longwood University with a major in English, a concentration in Rhetoric and Professional Writing, and a minor in Children's Literature. In addition to Harry Potter and adaptation theory, her interests include cultural rhetoric, rhetoric of social change, and feminist literature.

Date Created

2019-12-18

Rights Statement

Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.

Data source

OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/1104

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