by Mark Innes

Created on: April 21, 2010

So, Potter as literature? The first response of many traditionally learned types to this question will, of course, be a predictable guffaw of condemnation. Potter is too derivative, too simplistic, too...popular, surely to be even be considered worthy of a place in the cannon.

However, this reaction is a knee-jerk one. On two grounds. Firstly, the nature of what we consider 'literature' - that is, reading matter worthy of study and analysis - is changing. Secondly, the notion that derivative, simplistic and popular are reasons for exclusion from the hallowed circle of literary greatness is a folly.

Let us deal with the latter point first. In order to do so, we must first ask ourselves one simple question. What is Harry Potter? Well, what Potter is, is the story of one young mans coming of age, a struggle, a triumph of good over evil, a journey. New ground, hardly? But unfruitful ground? Certainly not.

A veritable procession of the greatest writers in the English language - and plenty more languages besides - have plowed this fertile furrow for centuries, if not longer, and produced some of the works of literature deemed not just suitable for academic study, but the very cornerstones of literary analysis.

Take Charles Dickens, for example. and arguably his masterpiece, Great Expectations. Then consider the parallels with his magical 21st century  counterpart. Orphaned: check. Raised by an uncaring replacement family or parent: check. Taken away from home to be placed in a position of great importance which he must learn - through trial and error, helped and hindered by others along the way - to deal with responsibly, leaving him transformed by the stories end: check.  

And what is more, Dickens was a popular and commercially successful writer. No, not quite as commercially successful as Rowling - but then who is? And furthermore, was Dickens original in telling the story of a young boy growing older and wiser? The theme is as old as story-telling itself, going back to the Bible, the Ancient Greeks and beyond.  

Next, consider just how many of our great works of literature could be said to fall into this category. L.P Hartley's 'The Go Between' is another that springs immediately to mind. Indeed, pretty much any bildungsroman - the term itself, a literary one, meaning simply in German: "novel of education". Is this not what Harry Potter is? In exactly the same way that James Joyce's 'Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man' charts the moral and social

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