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Harry Potter was not original. Anyone who grew up reading English Children's books would recognize that it is a pastiche of virtually the whole canon of 20th century English Kid Lit, in which train...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:50Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24738 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:37:36Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24738 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:37:36Z (almost 5 years ago)
Harry Potter was not original. Anyone who grew up reading English Children's books would recognize that it is a pastiche of virtually the whole canon of 20th century English Kid Lit, in which trains and boarding schools and magic all play a role. Everything I read growing up is in there. If Rowling has a virtue in this regard it is not that she is original but that she successfully repackaged that whole canon for today's child. And that, I would suggest, is where the real secret of literary success lies, not in originality but in repackaging old stories and old tropes for a new generation. Stories have a very specific emotional structure that you really can't mess with much and still expect to engage the reader. The world keeps changing, but the emotional core of story does not. The task of the writer, therefore, it not to reinvent stories but to retell them for an every changing world.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-09-24T20:44:59Z (about 8 years ago)
Original score: 11