| Harry Potter series,written by contemporary British writer J.K.Rowing,has achieved great commercial success and global influence via translations in many languages and global issued movies,thus become a representative of contemporary popular literature.The themes,plot and characters in Harry Potter series are familiar to the readers,indicating Rowling’s full use of literary “Cliché”,the allusions,conventions,established plot-modes and archetypes,to create a new story.The mechanism of creation and literary features of Harry Potter deserve an in-depth intertextual study to better understand Harry Potter and its fellow popular works,also to discover the relationship between Harry Potter and the literary tradition on which it relies.The once fierce dispute on the literary values and educational functions of this novel series was over,and the literary and cultural values have been accepted and studied through multiple-theoretical perspective,interdisciplinary and diversified researches,among which,social,historical and cultural criticism focuses on and discusses about the social reality and problems reflected in the series,while textcentered criticism discovers the intertextuality between the series and literary canons and tradition,and examines the traces of literary inheritance in Harry Potter.Medieval Romance is also studied as intertextually related to Harry Potter.Harry Potter adopts the elements and conventions of Medieval Romance to touch the truth of modern life,which was echoed positively by many readers.The mechanism,strategies and methods of Rowling’s rewriting of Romance are explained and analyzed in this thesis,to better understand the innovation of Rowling’s work and the interest of contemporary readers.The concept of “Rewriting” is established on the basis of Intertextual theories,as a combination of Bakhtin,Kristeva and Barthe’s discussion of text as a texture of many diverse discourses,reflecting history,culture and ideology,and Gerald Genette’s study of specific intertextual methods.The framework of Rewriting in this thesis,since every writing is a rewriting,indicates that to rewrite is to repeat,to renew,and to represent multiple voices.In this premise,Rowling’s Harry Potter series is discussed as an overall rewriting of Medieval Romance,and Rowling’s rewriting strategy is to take deconstructive appropriation as the basis,dialogical parody as the most important approach,and a reality-responding and broad resonant “echo” as the expected effect.Medieval chivalric romance,Arthurian romance in particular,enriched European literary tradition with three main themes: ideal chivalry,courtly love and magic as supernatural power.This thesis analyzes Rowling’s rewriting of the three themes separately to further explain the basis,the approach and the effect of her rewriting strategy.Firstly,the thesis discusses how Rowling deconstructs Chivalry,which in Medieval Romance was an ideal entity,and the archetypal Knight image through her deconstructive appropriation.Chivalry comes from different sources,mainly warrior ethics,court culture and Christianity,which are contradicted with each other.Rowling uses the four Houses of Hogwarts to deconstruct Chivalry as a whole,and further presents the contradiction and ruptures within Chivalry through the fights inside/between/among the houses.Rowling also deconstructively appropriates the image of King Arthur to build the rivalry between the “Doppelganger” characters Harry Potter and Voldemort.Harry and Voldemort,showing very similar characteristics as knight leaders,disagree with each other on their choice of “responsibility” and “will to power” which are pair qualities of Medieval Chivalry.Their different endings present a reevaluation on “fortune” and “choice”.Through deconstruction,appropriation,reconstruction and selection,Rowling discards violence and blood lineage in Chivalry,and stresses the importance of responsibility.Then,the thesis discusses Rowling’s rewriting of courtly love through dialogic parodies to reveal the paradox and dialogism inside courtly love.Rowling makes the best of the dialogism and ambiguity of parody,inherits the main conventions and patterns of courtly love on the one hand,and modifies the basic elements to twist the pattern,thus to question courtly love on the other hand.Severus Snape,a black‐wizard and an apparent anti‐knight image,is depicted as the performer of the “ennobling passion” convention,which forms a solemn “Beigesang” of courtly love.With the displacement of gender and position,Bellatrix Lestrange is depicted as a neurotic female‐knight,displaying violence,cruelty and evil generated by romantic love,which forms a satiric and distorted “Gegengesang” of courtly love.Rowling parodies courtly love from two different perspectives,questioning respectively the premise and result of the courtly love convention.Rowling’s two parodies and courtly love in Medieval Romance constitute a triangle,with their dialogues in between investigating the nature of love,and increasing the ambiguity and possibility of the text.Finally,the thesis discusses how Rowling rewrites magic and witchcraft to echo the Romance pre-texts and the contemporary context.Rowling’s rewriting of magic is not simple content appropriation but a reflection of the nowadays reality and society,based on a deconstruction and subversion of the occult nature of medieval magic.Rowling depicts witchcraft as “scientific”,depriving magic of its mystery and supernatural nature represented in Medieval Romance;the “disenchanted” magic performs as ordinary habitus and normality,instead of mysticism;magic is adopted as defamiliarization method to help the overall parody of reality in the novel series,giving highlight to the neglected weird facts in a distorted,comic and satiric way.Through deconstructive appropriation and dialogic parody,Rowling rewrites the important themes of Medieval Romance,echoing the traditional literary idealism while indicating the contradictions with modern values.Rowling discusses the connotation of Chivalry,trying to define a new “nobility”,depicts the complex relationship between love and good,touching all dimensions of love,and describes the current truth and weirdness of existing,responding to contemporary aloneness and anxiety.Harry Potter series,bringing idealism and story tradition of Romance back to the present reading,is thus a fantastic work based on realism,a magic narration blended with reality,a parody of modern life and people,and an embodiment of Rowling’s humorous sympathy and sensitive observation of nowadays society. |
PDF Full Text Request