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《哈利·波特》系列作品中的成人化现象研究
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I. Introduction
J. K. Rowling, born in 1965, British author, who writes about the magical adventures of a
boy wizard named Harry Potter. The Harry Potter book series dominated bestseller lists beginning
in the late 1990s, attracting millions of fans worldwide among children and adults alike.
(Microsoft Student, 2005)
Since the release of the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (retitled Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States) in 1997, the books have gained immense
popularity and commercial success worldwide, spawning films, video games and assorted
merchandise. The six books published to date have collectively sold more than 325 million copies
and have been translated into more than 63 languages. The seventh and last book in the series,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is scheduled to be released on 21 July 2007.
The stories take place in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,. The thread which
bridges all the stories is Harry Potter’s fighting against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who uses
the Dark Arts to kill Harry's parents and attempts to take over the wizarding world. (Wikipedia,
2007)
The academia categorizes the Harry Potter book series as children’s literature, because, for
example, it was once awarded the Smarties Book Prize Gold Award for 9-11 years (1997) and the
Whitbread Children's Book of the Year (1999). Children’s literature is writings designed to
appeal to children—either to be read to them or by them—including fiction, poetry, biography,
and history. It also includes riddles, precepts, fables, legends, myths, and folk poems and
folktales based on spoken tradition. (Microsoft Student, 2005) However, in the book series,
there are some characteristics and contents against the definition of children’s literature. This
paper will reveal that J. K. Rowling focuses her readership not only on children but also on
adolescents, even adults. The redirection of the Harry Potter book series towards adult readers
will be the main research target of this paper.
II. The Exploration on the Redirection towards Adults
2.1 Lexical and syntactic analysis
Generally speaking, children’s reading ability is developing. Therefore, the writer will not
push them too hard by some complicated word or sentences. Works of ancient literature, such as
the stories by Greek poet Homer, are often adaptable to children's reading because of their simple
narrative forms. (Microsoft Student, 2005)
To explore the redirection of the book series from the lexical and syntactic aspects, we may
look at the Table 1, about the average word and sentence length of the books. (Wordsmith is used
《哈利·波特》系列作品中的成人化现象研究
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to obtain statistics results)
Table 1 – Statistics about the words and sentences in HP2
HP 1 HP 2 HP 3 HP 4 HP 5 HP 6 HP Overall
Ave. Word Length
(letters) 4.34 4.44 4.47 4.44 4.47 4.45 4.45
Sentences 4,693 4,741 6,225 10,733 15,707 11,494 53,977
Ave. Sent. length
(words) 16.6 18.04 16.93 17.91 16.35 14.98 16.59
Then, let’s look at the Table 2 and 3, about the novels mainly for adults and 6 fairy tales by
Hans Christian Anderson.
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