JK Rowling’s Harry Potter tells the story of the orphan Harry who learns on his 11th birthday that he is in fact a wizard. His world changes suddenly as he leaves his childhood home at the Dursleys (his last surviving relatives) who are muggles, ie non-magical folk, to enter Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an Enid Blytonesque boarding school whose inhabitants are all magical people.Each of the seven novels of the series, published between 1997 and 2007, corresponds roughly to one year of Harry’s life, following his journey from adolescence to adulthood in the literary tradition of a bildungsroman. A bildungsroman, from the German for Novel of Formation, follows the moral and psychological development of its protagonist, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) a classic early work in the genre.When Harry Potter was first published, it started as an engaging and humorous tale of magic centred around stock fairytale characters such as the wizard Albus Dumbledore and the giant Hagrid. These characters are portrayed very simplistically through the lens of Harry’s adolescent understanding: Dumbledore as a gentle authority and Hagrid as a good-hearted but dim groundskeeper. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), also involves Blytonesque antics: one night, the children smuggle a pet dragon out of the castle grounds and are then caught by a teacher.However, the tone of the books slowly but surely evolves as Harry grows into a young man facing mature problems, confronting an oppressive political system. The edges of his fantasy world subsequently expand to incorporate the philosophical and the political. The lines between the fairytale notions of good and evil blur as Harry realises that his hero Dumbledore dallied with Dark Wizards and attempted to instil an apartheid between magical and non-magical folk. In the last book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), Harry and his friends infiltrate the Ministry of Magic’s trials for non-magical people — the regime perhaps a thinly disguised Nazi metaphor. Harry also undergoes quintessential adolescent experiences, such as falling in love, making and breaking friendships, and the traumas of the school system. Each book poses a new and increasingly difficult challenge for Harry: in the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), he has to contend with moral ambiguity in a very real way as he realises that he was misinformed about the circumstances of his parents’ death. By the fifth novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), he learns to channel his frustration at the ministry’s interference at his school into effective social change.Rowling relates the series in the third person but even then largely from the perspective of someone closely following Harry around, almost looking over his shoulder1. For example in The Philosopher’s Stone, the reader gains an insight into one of Harry’s thoughts: ‘Wood? thought Harry, bewildered; was Wood a cane that she was going to use on him?’2 In literary terms, by maintaining a close narrative distance (the extent to which the reader is privy to the thoughts of the protagonist), Rowling is able to skilfully characterise the full extent of Harry’s subjective internal world, while at the same time using the third-person narrative style to her advantage to sketch developments in the objective fictional world around. This sets the stage for considering Harry’s intellectual and emotional development or his bildung within the roman or novel.Harry Potter as a bildungsroman facilitates Harry’s increasingly sophisticated reactivity to his fictional world — a world which nevertheless mimics themes in modern society, such as the problem of social and cultural separation between peoples (muggles and magical folk in the series).The close narrative distance in Harry Potter — and the way the novels carefully balance the state of internal subjectivity against the philosophy of external modernity — allows the audience to ‘grow up’ alongside Harry, capturing not only younger audiences but also older readers drawn to the ‘unique gravity’3 of the last few novels. (Bloomsbury, Harry Potter’s publisher, went to the extent of promoting the series as an adult fantasy, even publishing the novels with dedicated covers for adults and children.)Harry Potter has gone on to sell 500 million copies and grossed several billion pounds for its film adaptations. The series has been translated into at least 79 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek. When novels give themselves the space to expand their myths, they also allow child audiences to grow and mature while capturing groups of adult readers.