Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 2023, 6(16); doi: 10.25236/AJHSS.2023.061624.
Qianyi Zhou
College of Arts, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China
Harry Potter is a world-renowned work of children's literature, but also because of its children's literary nature, its highly meaningful political allegory has been neglected. This paper attempts to discuss the political allegorical nature of the book and its connection to the long-standing backlog of class and race issues in British society by analyzing the three main sets of antagonisms in the wizarding community set up by author Rowling in Harry Potter. The argument in this paper finds that Rowling can be said to have taken the two main oppositions in British society: class and race, and visualized them in a political allegory as these three groups of oppositions in the wizard world, and presented them to the fullest extent. The confrontation between the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters symbolizes the struggle between social progress and conservative forces, between the forces of good and the forces of evil; the struggle between pure-blooded and non-pure-blooded wizards symbolizes the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in England; the confrontation between werewolves and wizards symbolizes the plight of infectious disease patients in society; the confrontation between domestic elves and wizards symbolizes the racial and national confrontation between first-world countries and third-world countries. At the same time, we can analyze the two main solution ideas given by Rowling in the book: solidarity struggle and fairness and transparency in education.
political allegory, class, racial antagonism, three groups of antagonism in the wizarding community
Qianyi Zhou. The Three Opposites in the Novel Harry Potter and Its Political Allegoricality. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2023) Vol. 6, Issue 16: 156-160. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2023.061624.
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