Stuart Kelly: Sales figures don’t necessarily earn literary merit

St Andrews University was to hold a conference on Harry Potter as literature, my first thought was at least the delegates would be home by lunchtime.

That JK Rowling’s books are a phenomenon is not in question. As a phenomenon they can profitably be studied. That the books have given a great deal of pleasure to many children, some of them surprisingly elderly, is not in question. Mind you, so has Sonic the Hedgehog.

Neither their sales figures nor their fan base is justification for treating the Harry Potter books as literature. One could study the impressive range of writing to which Rowling paid homage, but even playing spot the allusion is the work of an afternoon in a good library, not a scholarly exercise.

Critics as astute as AS Byatt and Harold Bloom express concern at intellectuals jumping on to the bandwagon: Byatt wrote of the “substitution of celebrity for heroism” that typifies the books, and Bloom points out that a single page (page four of The Philosopher’s Stone) has seven clichés.

Children’s literature does not attract as much serious academic work as it should, and by concentrating on the merely profitable, a conference such as this misses the opportunity to look at the genuine genius in children’s writing.

Harry Potter bears the same relationship to high literature as all those books like The Sword of Shannara, Eragon and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain bear to Tolkein’s cycle – or indeed, Tolkein’s cycle bears to Scandinavian epic poetry.

• Stuart Kelly is the books editor of Scotland on Sunday.