|
Jul 24
|
Soon after the start of Harry’s second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, messages on the walls of the corridors say that the Chamber of Secrets has been re-opened and that the “Heir of Slytherin” would kill all pupils whose parents are not both magical – which includes Hermione. Over the next few months, various inhabitants of the school are found petrified in corridors. Meanwhile, Harry, Ron, and Hermione discover Moaning Myrtle, the ghost of a girl who was killed the last time the Chamber was opened and now haunts the girls’ toilet in which she died. Myrtle shows Harry a diary bearing the name Tom Marvolo Riddle. Although its pages are blank, it responds when Harry writes in it. Eventually the book shows him Hogwarts as it was fifty years ago. There he sees Tom Riddle, Head Boy at the time, blame Rubeus Hagrid, who was then thirteen years old and already kept dangerous creatures as pets, for opening the Chamber. Four months later the diary is stolen, and shortly afterward Hermione is petrified. However, she holds a note explaining that the culprit is a basilisk, a huge serpent whose gaze kills those who look into its eyes directly but only petrifies those who see their reflection. Hermione concluded that the monster travels through the school’s pipes and emerges through the toilet Myrtle haunts. As the attacks continue, Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, holds Hagrid in the wizards’ prison as a precaution. Lucius Malfoy, Draco’s father and a former supporter of Voldemort who claims to have reformed, announces that the school’s governors have suspended Dumbledore from the position of headmaster. After Ron’s younger sister, Ginny, is taken into the Chamber, the staff insist that the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart, should handle the situation. However, when Harry and Ron go to his office to tell him what they have discovered about the basilisk, Lockhart reveals that he is a fraud who took credit for the accomplishments of others and attempts to erase the boys’ memories. Disarming Lockhart, they march him to Moaning Myrtle’s toilet, where Harry opens the passage to the Chamber of Secrets. In the sewers under the school, Lockhart grabs Ron’s wand and tries again to wipe the boys’ memories, but since Ron’s wand had been damaged, the spell backfires, inflicting total amnesia on Lockhart, collapsing part of the tunnel, and separating Harry from Ron and Lockhart. While Ron attempts to tunnel through the rubble, Harry enters the Chamber of Secrets, where Ginny lies beside the diary. As he examines her, Tom Riddle appears, looking exactly as he did fifty years ago, and explains that he is a memory stored in the diary. Ginny wrote in it about her adolescent hopes and fears, and Riddle won her confidence by appearing sympathetic, possessed her, and used her to open the Chamber. Riddle also reveals that he is Voldemort as a boy. He further explains that he learned from Ginny who Harry was and about his own deeds as Voldemort. When Ginny realised that she had been responsible for the attacks, she attempted to throw the diary away, which is how it came into Harry’s possession. Riddle then releases the basilisk to kill Harry. Dumbledore’s pet phoenix, Fawkes, brings a magnificent sword wrapped in the Sorting Hat. Harry uses the sword to kill the basilisk, but only after being bitten by the creature’s venomous fangs, one of which breaks off. As Riddle gloats over the dying Harry, Fawkes weeps on Harry’s wound to cure it. Harry stabs the diary with the broken fang, and Riddle vanishes.[1] Ginny revives and they return to Ron, who is still watching over the amnesic Lockhart. Fawkes carries all four out of the tunnels. Harry recounts the whole story to Dumbledore, who has been reinstated. When Harry mentions his fears that he is similar to Tom Riddle, Dumbledore says that Harry chose Gryffindor House, and only a true member of that House could have used Godric Gryffindor’s sword to kill the basilisk. Lucius Malfoy bursts in, and Harry accuses him of slipping the diary into Ginny’s bag while the pupils were shopping for school books. Finally, the basilisk’s petrified victims are revived by a potion, the preparation of which has taken several months.
No Password
TaGs: Book, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, Literature
Processing your request, Please wait....
The novels revolve around Harry Potter, an orphan who discovers at the age of eleven that he is a wizard, living within the ordinary world of non-magical, or Muggle, people. His ability is inborn and such children are invited to attend a school that teaches the necessary skills to succeed in the wizarding world. Harry becomes a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and it is in here where most of the novels’ events take place. As Harry develops through his adolescence, he learns to overcome the problems that face him: magical, social and emotional, including ordinary teenage challenges such as friendships and exams, and the greater test of preparing himself for the confrontation that lies ahead. Each book chronicles one year in Harry’s life with the main narrative being set in the years 1991–98. The books also contain many flashbacks, with a significant number being from the year 1976 when Harry’s parents were in their fifth year at Hogwarts. Other memories date from various determinable and undeterminable periods after 1945, although little reference is made to historic features or events of any period. The only specific dates given in the series are in the second and seventh book. In the second, Chamber of Secrets, a 500th anniversary of a date of death is stated to be measured from 1492 (making the year of the 500th anniversary 1992). In the final book, on the grave of Harry’s parents, James and Lily Potter, their year of death is given as taking place in 1981.
The Harry Potter prequel is an 800-word story written by J. K. Rowling, and was published online on 11 June 2008. Set about three years before the birth of Harry Potter, the story recounts an adventure experienced by Sirius Black and James Potter. Muggle Policemen PC Anderson and Sergeant Fisher are chasing a motorbike which is breaking the speed limit into a dead-end alley. Confronting the two youths riding the bike, they ask for their names. After some joking, the boys introduce themselves as Sirius Black and James Potter. As the policemen attempt to arrest them for speeding and riding without helmets, three Death Eaters on broomsticks fly down the alley towards them. James and Sirius use their wands to lift the police car up to form a barrier, and the broomstick riders crash into it. Sirius and James then leave the frightened policemen in the alley.
Each volume in the “Collector’s Library” series has a specially commissioned Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list. The Afterword for this first collected edition of M. R. James’s “Complete Ghost Stories” is by the well-known crime writer and eminent Sherlockian, David Stuart Davies. This is the only complete edition in print and it contains three further stories written after publication of M. R. James’s “Collected Ghost Stories”: “The Experiment”, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” and “A Vignette”.
The fantastical world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is a land of rugged valleys and strange gothic forests inhabited by wizards and goblins. This world comes to life within the vast vaults of our imagination – and it may unnerve devotees of The Hobbit, Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings to physically encounter this world in paint and paper. Can the full evilness of Smaug, that demon of jaws and fire, ever be reproduced in a picture? Thankfully and reassuringly, Tolkien’s World does not denigrate our very personal conceptions of this place in any way. An array of talented artists conjure up brilliant images on canvas, inspired by specific passages from the texts.
Many of the most popular British poets – the ones most taught and studied in classrooms – wrote during the 19th century. Among them were the famous Romantic poets, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordworth, John Keats, George Gordon Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Victorian poets, such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. “The Facts On File Companion to British Poetry: 19th Century” is a new encyclopedic guide to the 19th-century authors, poetry, historical places, and themes common to this literary period. This essential A-to-Z reference boasts a comprehensive and accessible format. It features poets, including the great Romantics and Victorians, as well as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.B. Yeats, and many more. It looks at major poems and books of poetry, such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and “Sonnets from the Portuguese” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It deals with an important movement in poetry, such as the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites Influential journals. It features terms and concepts, such as sublime and negative capability.
Adoption in other cultures and other times provides a background to understanding the operation of adoption in the Roman worlds. This book considers the relationship of adoption to kinship structures in the Greek and Roman world. It considers the procedures for adoption followed by a separate analysis of testamentary cases, and the impact of adoption on nomenclature. The impact of adoption on inheritance arrangements is considered, including an account of how the families of freedmen were affected. Its use as a mode of succession at Rome is detailed, and this helps to understand the anxiety of childless Romans to procure a son through adoption, rather than simply to nominate heirs in their wills. The strategy also had political uses, and importantly it was used to rearrange natural succession in the imperial family. The book concludes with political adoptions, looking at the detailed case studies of Clodius and Octavian.
“Every reading is, strictly speaking, unrepeatable; something in it, of it, will vary. Recollections of reading accumulate in relation to this iterable specificity; each takes its predecessors as its foundation, each inflects them with its backward-looking futurity.” In Ex-foliations, Terry Harpold investigates paradoxes of reading’s backward glances in the theory and literature of the digital field. In original analyses of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and in innovative readings of early hypertext fictions by Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, Harpold asserts that we should return to these landmarks of new media scholarship with newly focused attention on questions of media obsolescence, changing user interface designs, and the mutability of reading. In these reading machines, Harpold proposes, we may detect traits of an unreadable surface—the real limit of the machines’ operations and of the reader’s memories—on which text and image are projected in the late age of print.
In late-fourteenth-century England, the persistent question of how to live the best life preoccupied many pious Christians. One answer was provided by a new genre of prose guides that adapted professional religious rules and routines for lay audiences. These texts engaged with many of the same cultural questions as poets like Langland and Chaucer; however, they have not received the critical attention they deserve until now. Nicole Rice analyses how the idea of religious discipline was translated into varied literary forms in an atmosphere of religious change and controversy. By considering the themes of spiritual discipline, religious identity, and orthodoxy in Langland and Chaucer, the study also brings fresh perspectives to bear on Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. This new juxtaposition of spiritual guidance and poetry will form an important contribution to our understanding of both authors and of late medieval religious practice and thought.
