Despite their phenomenal decades-long success, the Harry Potter novels have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and scholars. While popular books, articles, blogs, and fan sites for general readers and listeners proliferate, and while philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and even business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars have paid few serious visits to the Potterverse. Could it be that scholars are still reluctant to recognize popular novels, especially those with genre labels "children's literature" or "fantasy," as worthy subjects for academic study?

This book challenges that oversight, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to twenty-first-century literary culture. In Open at the Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. They interrogate the novels on many levels, but they come together around the overarching question: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it that makes the Harry Potter novels so exceptionally compelling, so irresistible to their readers and listeners, and so relevant in our time?