Transfiguring Transcendence in Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and Left Behind: Fantasy Rhetorics and Contemporary Visions of Religious Identity

Three recent and commercially successful series of novels employ and adapt the resources of popular fantasy fiction to create visions of religious identity: J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series. The act of creating fantasy counter-worlds naturally involves all three stories in the creation of what Mike Gray terms "transfigurations of transcendence": hopeful albeit paradoxical encodings of the ambiguous,...