posted on 2025-06-30, 05:19authored byJanet Iafrate
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga can be considered, in a contemporary political context, a liberal-slanted series with a setting that includes corrupt government, resistance to injustices, ideal characters, and underlying messages about how to treat people. This focus is enlarged in this article to include the treatment of, and retaliation against, criminals, enemies and villains. While compassion toward kind, lovable characters like Hagrid and Lupin is easy to achieve, Rowling does something even more radical when she asks her readers to examine the actual treatment of the unlovable, irredeemable enemies in the story, and suggests that in order to defeat our enemies, we must make different and ultimately better choices than those enemies.
History
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's Literature
ISSN
1551-5680
Volume
13
Issue
3
Publisher
La Trobe University
Section Title
Jabberwocky
Author Biography
Janet Iafrate earned her B.A. in English from Fordham University (USA) and her M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Studies from the University of Newcastle on Tyne (UK), focusing on children's and young adult literature. She currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches English literature and creative writing at Saint Basil Academy.
Date Created
2009-11-06
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/164
