The seven books in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, published consecutively over a nine-year period, have achieved unprecedented commercial success. Given the heterogeneity of Harry Potter enthusiasts, it seems as if the whole world has been captivated by the charm of the bespectacled wizard. This article suggests that Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Sorcery trains its students to be leaders, equipping them with the necessary skills by means of pedagogical methods that reflect contemporary, non-magical, progressive Western education systems. For the construction of her plots, Rowling draws on a universal, value-oriented symbolic language (reason and ethics) associated with the cultural codes of New Spiritualism.
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's LiteratureISSN
1551-5680Volume
17Issue
1Publisher
La Trobe UniversitySection Title
Alice's AcademyAuthor Biography
Danielle Gurevitch is an ethnologist, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director and Lecturer at the Multidisciplinary Program at Bar Ilan University. Her studies include contemporary fantasy literature and its origins in Medieval English and French prose. Gurevitch is the editor (with Hagar Yanai) of With Both Feet in the Clouds: On Fantasy in Hebrew Literature, Graff and Heksherim Institute at Ben-Gurion University, 2009 (in Hebrew), and (with Elana Gomel) of With Both Feet in the Clouds: On Fantasy in Israeli Literature, Waltham, MA: Graff Publications and Academic Press, 2012 (in English).Date Created
2013-07-11Rights 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/386
