The latest of the Warner Brother’s Harry Potter films is out (for those of you under rocks). This year’s instalment is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the series which has been broken into two instalments. Here are a few of the articles that I’ve loved about the Harry Potter phenomenon recently. (If you have others please add a comment.)

The feminist in me loves the following:

An Unabashed Loved Letter to Ginny Weasley, by Chloe, via the Feministing website:

I realized that you, Ginny Weasley, are more awesome than Viktor Krum is surly. You are more excellent than Peter Pettigrew is cowardly. You are a badass feminist witch and I am so glad that you are around as a heroine for young women reading the Potter series.

This is great. I began reading the Harry Potter series when I was 25, and it makes me wonder what it would have been like to grow up with them.

‘Harry Potter’ – Why It’s so Hard to Say Goodbye, by Alyssa Rosenburg. She notes:

Harry Potter hasn’t just been a series for me: it’s the cultural framing device of an entire generation… My great love is for Hermione Granger, one of Harry’s best friends, a girl born to human parents with magical abilities, who I believe is perhaps the greatest and most progressive popular romantic heroine of a generation. When makeover narratives were the single most prevalent romantic storyline in popular culture, Hermione got the guy in the library, dressed up for the Yule Ball, and returned placidly to her regular routine. Hermione didn’t transform herself because she never particularly felt the need to be transformed.

I love Hermione too and if by some (dark) force I ever had to swap lives with a fictional character – she is my heroine of choice.

There is also Harry Potter and the Incredibly Conservative Aristocratic Children’s Club. This article does a great analysis of the politics of J.K Rowling. It begins:

The richly imaginative details of J.K. Rowling’s fictive world, it must be admitted, are pleasurable. The hot-rod brooms, the flowing robes and flying cars, the goth Heaven of the sullen Slytherins, the snake language and the magic wands enclosing phoenix feathers or unicorn hairs, the metamorphic potions, the leaping or fizzing sweets! All these have been fully and lovingly realized in the Warner Brothers movie adaptations of the Harry Potter books, including the most recent, which is a fine-looking but completely incoherent mess with a morally bankrupt and politically repugnant story at its core.

 Note: the last two references were found via Rachel Hill’s Musings of an Inappropriate Woman.