Early in its history, Harry Potter received overwhelmingly positive reviews, which helped the
series to quickly grow a large readership. Upon its publication, the first
volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher''s Stone, was greatly praised by most of Britain''s major newspapers: the Mail on Sunday rated it as "the most imaginative debut since Roald Dahl"; a view echoed by the Sunday Times ("comparisons to Dahl are, this
Time, justified"), while The Guardian
called it "a richly textured novel given lift-off by an inventive wit" and The Scotsman said it had "all the makings of a classic".<65> By the time of the release of the fifth volume, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the
books began to receive strong criticism from a number of
literary scholars. Yale professor and literary scholar and
critic Harold Bloom raised pungent criticisms of the books'' literary merits, saying "Rowling''s mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing."<66> A. S. Byatt authored a New York Times op-ed article calling Rowling''s universe a "secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children''s literature ... written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".<67> The critic Anthony Holden wrote in The Observer on his experience of judging Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was very negative—"the Potter saga was essentially patronising, very conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain," and he speaks of "pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style<68>." By contrast, author Fay Weldon, while admitting that the series is "not what the poets hoped for," nevertheless goes on to say, "but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable, everyday, useful prose".<69> The literary critic A.N. Wilson praised the Harry Potter series in ''The Times'', stating: "There are not many writers who have JK''s Dickensian ability to make us turn the pages, to weep – openly, with tears splashing – and a few pages later to laugh, at invariably good jokes...We have lived through a decade in which we have followed the publication of the liveliest, funniest, scariest and most moving children''s stories ever written." <70> Charles Taylor of Salon.com, who is primarily a movie critic,<71> took issue with Byatt''s criticisms in particular. While he conceded that she may have "a valid cultural point—a teeny one—about the impulses that drive us to reassuring pop trash and away from the troubling complexities of art", he rejected her claims that the series is lacking in serious literary merit and that it owes its success merely to the childhood reassurances it offers. Taylor stressed the progressively darker tone of the books, shown by the murder of a classmate and close friend and the psychological wounds and social isolation each causes. Taylor also pointed out that Philosopher''s Stone, said to be the most lighthearted of the seven published books, disrupts the childhood reassurances that Byatt claims spur the series'' success: the book opens with news of a double murder, for example.<72> Stephen King called the series "a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable," and declared "Rowling''s punning, one-eyebrow-cocked sense of humor" to be "remarkable." However, he wrote that despite the story being "a good one," he is "a little tired of discovering Harry at home with his horrible aunt and uncle," the formulaic beginning of all seven books.<33> King has also joked that "
''s never met an adverb she didn''t like!" He does however predict that Harry Potter "will indeed stand time''s test and wind up on a shelf where only the best are kept; I think Harry will take his place with Alice, Huck, Frodo, and Dorothy andhe decade, but for the ages."<73> Orson Scott Card wrote a review of Deathly Hallows in which he said, "J.K. Rowling has created something that . . . deserves to last, to become a permanent classic of English literature, and not just as ''children''s fiction.''"<74> Tina Jordan of Entertainment Weekly called Deathly Hallows "stunningly beautiful" and predicted that "these books are going to be on my grandchildren''s shelves, and my great-grandchildren''s, and maybe even further down the line than that."<75> A Telegraph review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and of the series as a whole, observed that Rowling''s success was entirely self-made and not due to hype of her books by the publishing world, which has instead followed in her wake.<76> The books have also spawned studies investigating the saga''s literary merit. One collaboration by a number of critics is The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter. In this volume, Amanda Cockrell concludes, "Harry Potter is not the lightweight imitation of such serious high fantasy as A Wizard of Earthsea or The Lord of the Rings, but a legitimate descendant of the darker and more complicated school story," and suggests that "we need to take a deeper look into Harry Potter, who is deeper than we think.
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