We get to see a wide variety of nonfiction books in canon, there's schoolbooks, spellbooks, books about magical creatures, law books, dark arts books, sport books etc, but there's not a lot of fictional books.
From what I remember, there's only two:
The Tales of Beedle the Bard: a fairytale collection
The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle: a comic book

So, what are some interesting titles you think we can find at Flourish and Blotts?
Does the illustrations move? Maybe there's talking children books?

In a similar vein, do you think the WWN produce radio dramas? If so, what kind? Does wizarding radio dramas have some magical effects that we lack in ours?

And we know from TToBtB that Hogwarts did attempt (and fail) a theatre production, and that Professor Herbert Beery left to teach at W.A.D.A (Wizarding Academy of Dramatic Arts), so wizarding theatre is canon.
What kind of plays do they produce? Do they have musicals? Dumbledore was assigned to "special effects" on the Hogwarts production of Fountain of Fair Fortune, so that is a part of it.

And maybe you know of some fanfics that feature fictional wizarding works? Like "Harry Is A Dragon, And That's Okay" by Saphroneth, or "FRICTION" by Windschild8178

 

Between the entire published canon of Gilderoy Lockhart and the output of the Daily Prophet in the last four books, Rowling probably figured she had fiction covered already.

 

sick burn.

This may be a fanon idea (I can't exactly remember) but there are novelizations of Harry Potter's childhood and of course highly questionable accounts of his role in the fall of Voldemort considering there were no eyewitnesses.

In Taure's Victoria Potter Victoria attends a play produced by Gilderoy Lockhart. IIRC the production uses magic to make the experience much more active, like a Pensieve.

I'm curious how wizards would treat literature that includes characters they take to be historical (e.g. Circe in Odyssey, who has a Chocolate Frog card). Would they be just as interested in/influenced by these texts as Muggles have been? (I think so considering Beedle the Bard is akin to the fairytales collected by the Brothers Grimm.) Or, since they know the truth about magic, would these texts have been discarded as unhelpful sources?

 

A wizarding version of the Archers on the Wireless? About a fictional community of wizards living in and around a small muggle village? Naturally the muggles are portrayed somewhat inaccurately, and the plots tend to be around things like Old Bill let his (insert magical animal here) lose in the village again, and the clever wizards need to stop the silly muggles from noticing. Side plots of love potions, romances, and the occasional duel.

 

Pure fanon, never happened in the books

 

One of my uncompleted (and as yet unpublished stories) contained the fictional book Durus Danger and the Forgotten Temple of Doom. It stars Durus Danger as a curse breaker adventurer, who also sometimes battles his half brother the death eater Evodius.

 

On the magical effects thing, it could be quite cool (and would fit with my perception of HP magic) if the wireless could produce scents/smells as well as sound, or perhaps even influence emotions?

 

I really like the sound of this, I can easily imagine this being something Molly Weasley would listen to.

This sounds really good! Harry and Ron being friends and solving mysteries is just the thing to pique my interest in a story. I like the idea of real spells being used in novels with instructions added

 

I'd thought that the Arthurian legend would, in Britain at least, concentrate more on Merlin, so you'd have Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table as some kind of Arthurian epic for Wizarding Britain.

 

Canon actually has some info on this! Apparently a lot of the wizarding version of the mythcycle focuses on Sir Cadogan, a bumbling but very brave wizarding Knight of the Round Table.

 

I'm not really sure how a wizarding Knight would work, given they were all supposed to be devout Catholics and the holy grail mythos. Maybe wizards of that time were catholics too?

Did you mean bumbling?

 

Yes, sorry. Fixed bumbling.

More generally, the further back in time you go, the more you should expect wizarding and muggle social norms to allign. The withdraw of the wizarding world was a slow separation, followed by a sudden complete break. Go back a thousand years, when the separation was less pronounced, and they should be a lot more religious wizards, I imagine. See for example the Fat Friar. It would also be rather strange for wizards to avoid the important social role of knight.

As for why modern day wizards are less religious? Some people might speculate on magic overlapping badly with parts of the Bible but I don't think that's very important honestly. Religion changes to meet the needs of man, not the other way around. In a world where magic is practised openly and by members of high society, that sort of magic isn't going to be seen as wrong. Of course not. Its that other sort of magic done by evil people and foreigners than is bad.

At a guess, following increased separation between muggle and wizarding worlds, magic allowed the wizarding world to create a first world standard of living. This jump started the process of secularisation and cultural Christianity we see in the real modern world.

 

In real life, the mythos of the Knights of the Round Table was very much built up over time. As I recall, it was first Welsh, then built upon further by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Then the kings of England usurped the Arthurian cycle to legitimize themselves and to serve as basically propaganda, at which we point we go from Bedivere being really important to being a minor character, all things considered. Then the French, always up for taking English things and improving on them, went a step further and added characters like Lancelot and Galahad.

Christianity wasn't necessarily a huge thing in the original stories, is what I'm trying to say. Merlin was probably based on a pagan Irish figure, before he later became a half-demon Anti-Christ who wasn't into the "anti" part.

But then again, if it's all real in-universe, who the fuck even knows?

 

In this example, the idea was for pop out boxes explaining the spells in the style of those old comic book ads, with the spells not being quite as good as advertised.

That said, I do quite like the idea that out and out spellbooks ala the Standard Book of Spells are the exception rather than the rule. Most books in the Hogwarts library would be more personal than that - holographs of their authors. They'd mix personal anecdotes, insights and spells in a somewhat unordered soup.

So there might be a travel log written by an 18th century wizard - What I Did On My Holidays. And this book may be considered an authority on the Trip Jinx! But it still would just be a description of his holiday adventure.

Scattered through the book, would be a few particularly insightful pages where he discussed the Trip Jinx and how he used it on his holiday. But it would all be mixed in with the history of the places he visited, the people he met, the food, the adventure, danger and so on. And there's no exact line where spell instruction starts and travel log stops. They just kind of flow into each other.

It gives wizarding knowledge an eclectic feel to match the rest of the wizarding world.

 

What would be the magical equivalent of scifi?

I was thinking something like stories based on what authors think magic could do in the same way scifi stories are stories based on what writers think science could do.

So things like dimension travel, (deep?) space travel, magical transhumanism (philosophers stone fiction such as "what ifs?", become a metamorphmagus, become a magical creature, become a sentient building, become a golem, etc) and cyberpunk (magic punk? How would that work?), the creation of universes/realities.

If we knew more firmly what is and isn't possible we could say the "not possible" is ripe for magic scifi.

Spoiler

I actually have a magical transhumanist story planned and also have a concept I've been playing with for the idea of powerful wizards being able to make realities.

 

It's canonical that Harry was mentioned in several history books for his "murder" of Voldemort; it wouldn't really be that surprising/out of the way if bits of Harry's life were adapted into book/play format at some point. I don't think they would've been written before or during his years at Hogwarts per say,* but it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that his kids or grandkids wouldn't hear reference to plays done about him.

*to be honest, I get the impression that people were mostly trying to rebuild their lives, so anything that came out in the aftermath of the Wizarding Wars or in the years immediately following it might not have been overly popular, especially with people whose family members had died during/as a result of the war. The magical population seems to be pretty small; I would imagine that a lot of people were impacted by one or both wars.

 

That would actually explain how Lockhart was able to pass his books of as required textbooks for his classes.