My Harvard Dissertation

In 2015, I successfully defended my dissertation, which was written for Harvard University's Department of Comparative Literature.  In 2017, I revised and published that dissertation as a book, Children's Literature Grows Up: Harry Potter and the Children's Literature Revolution.

Here is a brief synopsis of what you will find in the book, as described on the back cover:

“Children know such a lot now,” Peter Pan once told us. A century later, in the Age of Information, they know even more. So shouldn’t their literature rise up to meet them? Isn’t it time for children’s literature to grow up?

First conceived as her doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, with this extensive examination of J. K. Rowling’s series, Christina Phillips-Mattson argues that with the Harry Potter books we witness the beginning of a new era of children’s literature. Marking a departure from casual handbooks to the Harry Potter series, Phillips-Mattson provides the reader with a scholarly examination of Rowling’s novels—as well as other contemporary fictions for children by such novelists as Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, Catherynne Valente, and Neil Gaiman—that is also entertaining and accessible. In order to demonstrate that contemporary fictions for children are as complex, multifaceted, and worthy of serious academic inquiry as adult literature, Phillips-Mattson takes the reader on an exciting journey through a highly detailed history of children’s literature and shows us how Rowling’s novels belong to a rich and varied literary tradition by placing Harry Potter alongside Greek mythology, classic fairy tales, Golden Age texts like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Jane Austen’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Employing the criticism of Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, Phillips-Mattson responds to Rowling’s detractors and provides evidence of Rowling’s stylistic sophistication and complex narrative structure that underwrite the believability of her characters and her fictional world. An engaging, thought-provoking read for scholars, teachers, general readers of children’s literature, and Harry Potter enthusiasts, Children’s Literature Grows Up includes fascinating new research on spell language, intertextuality, moral agency, and psychological realism.

If you would like to purchase this book, please click here.