J.K. Rowling's 'magical' achievement

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- The phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series can be attributed to the author's "multi-layered style" and her respect for young readers, an information specialist believes.

Eliza T. Dresang, a professor at Florida State University's School of Information Studies, also said that the initial popularity of the first book in the seven-volume saga came from children spreading the word to each other on the Internet. The other important factor is that Rowling is "a uniquely talented writer" whose multidimensional approach has appeal for people of all ages.

"If you can see it, it's interesting; if you don't, it doesn't matter," Dresang told United Press International in a phone interview from Tallahassee.

Statistically, the Harry Potter phenomenon is unprecedented, she said. Some 117 million copies have been sold worldwide. The series has been translated into 48 languages and published in almost 200 countries. All this has happened since the appearance of "The Sorcerer's Stone," in 1997. The professor said that advance ticket sales for the $125 million movie, which opened at 7,000 U.S. theaters Friday, was the greatest in the history of cinema.

"I've read hundreds of books for young people, and Rowling is unique in that she has been able to do several things at one time." The author keeps "a compelling plot that never sags in her head all the way to the end of the seventh book. Kids know that you can't start in the middle, because there are tiny scenes in book one that don't get referenced again till book three or four.

"So it's really like this long saga that interweaves these tiny little elements that sometimes adults skip over but kids like to remember. Kids are very detail-oriented, and they'll notice that she talks about the cat on the fence in the first chapter of book one, which turns out to be (wizardess professor) Minerva McGonagall, and you don't get reference to that until book three somewhere."

Harry Potter "is every-person," Dresang said. "People identify with him, kids and adults alike. Harry has a special heritage, but he is unsure of himself. He doesn't know how to fight the evil forces. He has to learn; he has to struggle. Readers have some faith that he's going to make it because he has the special power, but he has to go through the struggle."

Rowling also has been able to pick up on popular culture -- "what kids like, gross humor, as in every-flavor jelly beans that are really every flavor" such as vomit and "wormed." Also, there's Myrtle the ghost who lives in the toilet. "So she writes for kids without talking down to them but bringing in their funny world."

Then there is Rowling's choice of names and images and the vitality of her language. "The plot aside, the ways she's described things like Hogwarts (the school for wizards) and quidditch (a game played on flying broomsticks) is so vivid," Dresang observed. Readers can easily enter her imaginary world.

"But she also is a very literate person, and she has many, many allusions to classical literature, contemporary literature, mythology and popular culture," the professor said.

In the mid-1980s, Joanne Kathleen Rowling studied French and Classics at Exeter University in southwestern England. Dresang told UPI that the literary allusions in Rowling's popular works have provoked much serious scholarship throughout the English-speaking world and would generate many doctoral dissertations. Not since "Alice in Wonderland" has children's literature received this kind of highbrow attention.

Dresang herself has written a chapter to the forthcoming academic tome "Harry Potter and the Ivory Tower" in which she devotes 11 typescript pages to Rowling's choice of the first name of Harry's friend Hermione Granger -- the series' principal female character.

The professor wrote that a Hermione appears in Greek mythology, in St. Luke's Acts of the Apostles, in Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale," as a character in D.H. Lawrence's novel "Women in Love," and as the title ("HERmione") of the autobiographical novel of imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, Lawrence's friend.

All "have a lot of the same characteristics of this girl child" in the Harry Potter series, Dresang told UPI. Rowling's choice of that name, rich in meaning, was not accidental, she said.

Dresang rejects the criticism that the girls in the series are stereotyped. In her academic paper, she argues, using feminist theory, that Hermione's self-determined actions signify "agency" in her own fate.

Hermione not only uses her intellect to gain control over her own life, Dresang writes, but as the series progresses she also "shows signs of overcoming her unpleasant, bossy nature and for directing her intellectual energy into socially useful causes in addition to solving puzzles for Harry and her friends."

Rowling told CNN's Larry King that the Hermione character "was most consciously based on a real person, and that person was me. She's a caricature of me when I was younger."

Dresang described Hermione as "the brains of the bunch." The professor said the full dimensions of Hermione's personality would not be evident in the movie because "she grows as the books grow. In the fourth book, she really starts to come into her own as a character and not just as a friend of Harry's who's there to support him."

Dresang thinks that the movie, far from "spoiling" the books for children, will spur them to read the series.

"Every time a major movie comes out, the book sales go up," she said. "It's hard to think of how they (the Potter books) can go up more, but I think that kids will read the books again. A lot of kids have been re-reading them to prepare to see the movie," so the book and the film are not competing for children's attention.

Dresang attributes the rise in sales of all children's books, as well as the library circulation of books written for young people, to the success of the Potter series. "It's been totally parallel," she said, citing statistics from Publisher's Weekly.

"Kids read 'Harry Potter,' then they want to read something else. Parents are reading with their kids and discovering that they WILL read long books. The fourth book is more than 700 pages, and everybody said, 'Kids won't read that,' but they did -- and they read it at young ages, and they read it over and over."

Science fiction author Sylvia Engdahl has written that her novels for young adults are suddenly being republished after having been out of print for many years largely because of "the phenomenal success of Harry Potter, which has created a demand for hardcover fantasy and science fiction for teens and is causing bookstores to carry more of it than in the past."

Dresang thinks Rowling "has an enormous respect for kids," which is evident in how she writes for them. "Children are a marginalized population that have been way underestimated," the professor said.

The information studies specialist is author of "Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age," and "School Censorship in the 21st Century," a guide for teachers and librarians.