J. K. Rowling appeared for the first time in the literary world in 1997 in England with her first book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone”. In the ten following years she published six more books creating the Harry Potter series. The books showed huge success and that led to their movie version in 2001.
The series is about the life of the young wizard Harry from the age of 11 to 17, focusing on his student years in Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizardry. The author takes us along in a journey towards Harry’s adultness. She describes the adventures, dangers, dilemmas and choices our young hero has to face covering them in a magic veil.
This essay focuses in tree basic questions. The first is the appearance of intertextual references in Rowling’s books, which are they and where do they spring from. For this search the theories about intertextuality of Michael Worton, Judith Still, Uberto Eco and others was used as a guide. The second question is the origin of the magic universe Rowling created. We try to find out if she was influenced by other great writers of fantasy literature like C. S. Lewis and we compare her work to Tolkien’s “Hobbit” and “Lord of the rings trilogy”. For the third question we try to figure out if the Harry Potter series follow the principals of evolutionary psychology in the way they were presented by Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Erick Erickson and others. If the modern teenager can identify his problems to those of the hero and relate to them. On the same time we investigate the path of Harry’s adultness in comparison to the evolution of the school’s environment.