Abstract of Paper to be Presented at Accio 2008

Holocaust History Amongst the Hallows – Understanding Evil in Harry Potter

Aida Patient
Kori Street

Black shirts, deaths heads, a narcissistic leader bent on dominating the world and death marks. Sounds like Germany in 1942. It's not; it's Hogwarts. This presentation engages the notion that images of the Holocaust are a metaphor for the evil in Harry Potter. Formulated within an approach informed by both reader-response and trauma theories, our reading of the novels and the Harry Potter films investigates the construction of evil and readers' understanding of the ways in which evil characters in fiction and film are aligned with socially traumatic events remembered collectively.