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Jk Rowling Mad- Anyone Else See This?


bookworm51485

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I just want to clear something up about the connection to star wars and harry potter. If any epic comes off as a rip off of the infamous trilogy it's because that trilogy was explicitly based on literary archetypes and established traditions. Joseph Campbell, the authority on the subject of myths and legends and their cultural impact, has written volumes on the concept of the epic and finds that in essence all stories featuring a hero figure are the same. He has also devoted much writing to Star Wars itself and it is well established that george lucas based the triology on campbell's writings.

I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books (Larsen and Larsen, 2002: 541).

So for star wars to incorporate the classic monomyth and for harry potter to mirror star wars is not any indication of plaigarism, it's simply her tapping into the story that has been told since man first learned to weave together stories. The link between Campbell and Rowling has been elaborated on in the following article:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa40...301/ai_n9183049

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  • 12 years later...
Guest Pegleg Tinstar

This debate hinges largely on what is and isn’t ‘intellectual property’.  If the HP Lexicon is a compendium if information extracted from the books, organized as a guide for readers of the books, then it is entirely based on JR’s intellectual property and she is right to expect both acknowledgement/credit, and ‘a piece of the action’, so to speak.

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