ABSTRACT
Anyone teaching, as well as many people reading, the Harry Potter series is aware that J. K. Rowling borrows from, or blends in, a number of literary genres while writing her books. A learned, sophisticated reader could rattle off the names of particular genres, such as school stories, the Bildungsroman, high fantasy, epic, medieval legend, and so on; while even a relatively untutored or inexperienced reader can sense the connections between Harry Potter and well-known stories such as Star Wars or famous fairytales like Cinderella. Yet despite the classic “trappings” of a Gothic novel, including “castles, ghosts, corrupt clergy, and so on,” as described by Donna Heiland in Gothic and Gender (2004: 4), not much mention of the Gothic has been made in the critical discourse of the Harry Potter novels. For example, as of June 2006, a search on the terms “Harry Potter” and “gothic” through the MLA bibliography database yielded zero hits. On the first page of her article “Generic Fusion and the Mosaic of Harry Potter,” Anne Hiebert Alton lists “gothic” as one of the genres within the series, along with “pulp fiction, mystery…horror stories, detective fiction, the school story and the closely related sports story, and series books” (2003: 141), but does not go on to explore the Gothic elements of the books. This lack of attention is understandable for the very reason addressed in Alton’s article title: “Generic Fusion.” Th e Gothic elements merge so smoothly into so many other genres within the Harry Potter series and are so natural to its setting that they are almost invisible or at least so normalized that it appears as if they do not merit attention. 1
