Article: Wizards and wainscots: generic structures and genre themes in the Harry Potter series.(Critical Essay)

THE central theme of the twentieth-century genre fantasy novel epitomised by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is frequently described simply as the conflict between Evil and Good. In The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel, however, Don D. Elgin suggests that genre fantasy does not in fact deal with "evil" and "good," at least as abstract moral concepts. Rather, it uses the discrete theatre of the Secondary World as a site for the exploration, comparison and judgement of two opposing and mutually exclusive paradigms of imaginative response to the environment within which human beings exist: one which constructs that environment as ...

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