Opinion: In today’s pages: Harry Potter vs. Harold Bloom
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Book critic Charles Taylor argues that the hoi polloi‘s beloved Harry Potter series is a literary success no matter what the critics say:
[W]e should remember that all those products came in response to the public’s enthusiasm and were not part of a campaign to create that enthusiasm. And that’s why those who ascribe the popularity of the Potter books to nothing more than the bad taste of the masses are so off the mark. The most prominent of those naysayers, that drooping defender of the canon, Harold Bloom, has, in his attacks on Rowling, provided us with fine examples of another reason for the Potter books’ popularity: the insularity of a literary culture that willfully ignores what it is that makes people readers in the first place.
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