Potteresque

From Potter +‎ -esque.

Potteresque (comparative more Potteresque, superlative most Potteresque)

1. Resembling or characteristic of the Harry Potter series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling.

   Synonyms: Harry Potteresque, Harry Potterish

   • 2001, Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace behind the Magick, Camp Hill, Pa.: Horizon Books, →ISBN, pages 126–127:

     A young teen who reads Rowling’s books, for example, might seek a Potteresque type of excitement by joining the London-based Ordo Anno Mundi (OAM), a sect of occultists who practice Ophidian Witchcraft (i.e., serpent-venerating). Like Hogwarts, which takes its wizards through seven years of training, the OAM has seven degrees of “Magical Training” that include classes strikingly similar to those offered at Hogwarts: […]

   • 2001, Sean Smith, J. K. Rowling: A Biography, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, →ISBN, page 178:

     Joanne was delighted at the choice of Daniel as she was with the ten-year-old Emma Watson and eleven-year-old Rupert Grint – a Potteresque name if ever there was one – to play Hermione and Ron.

   • 2005, Stephen Brown, Wizard!: Harry Potter’s Brand Magic (Great Brand Stories), Cyan Books, →ISBN, page 175:

     Marketing is inherently mysterious, and we forget this at our peril. It is mysterious not only in the sense that we still don’t know how advertising works, why Potteresque fads and crazes occur, or what the marketing philosophy is, exactly.

   • 2005 June, Tanya Brown, “UK Report”, in Chronicle, number 260, DNA Publications, Inc., page 30, column 3:

     Later in the day (hopefully after a solid night’s sleep, rather than any Potteresque nocturnal adventures) the children will return to the Great Hall of the castle for a Hogwarts-style banquet.

   • 2005 June 6, Rachel Deahl, “Wizards Of Rock”, in Express (a publication of The Washington Post), page 16:

     GRYFFINDOR GRUNGE: Joe and Paul’s Potteresque style gets kids listening.

   • 2006 April, Nick Lowe, “Mutant Popcorn”, in Interzone, number 203, page 68, column 1:

     If live-action debutant Andrew Adamson and his team can spin the numbers right, a franchise is born of Potteresque proportions that will make the Rings look like a quota quickie.

   • 2010, Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 76:

     The Grey School of Wizardry website has a number of very Potteresque features, including the ‘Magick Alley’ site from which textbooks and school equipment may be purchased. Although this is a virtual site, it is conceptually similar to Diagon Alley (‘diagonally’) in Harry Potter’s parallel London, where wands and robes, spell ingredients and companion animals (usually owls and cats, but sometimes rats and toads) can be purchased.

   • 2011, David Nolan, Emma Watson: The Biography, John Blake, →ISBN, page 5:

     Parents can expect to pay £20,000 for their children to board at the school and former pupils have the marvellously Potteresque name of Old Dragons.

   • 2011, Aaron Schwabach, Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection, Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 121:

     In his own adventures Buslaev’s world seems less Potteresque; like Volkov before him, Yemets started with an imported fictional world but, having grown confident from working with it, is taking it in a different direction from the one chosen by its original creator.

   • 2011, Richard Lukas Graham, Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s–2000s, New York, N.Y.: Abrams ComicArts, →ISBN, pages 90–91:

     The story was illustrated by Joe Kubert, best known for his work on the DC Comics character Sgt. Rock, and set at a Potteresque school, where instructors with names like Professor Rumbledoore teach army officers about the proper maintenance of magical equipment, including a flying jeep.

   • 2011, Great Breaks: Bath, Insight Guides, →ISBN, page 72:

     Other scenes set at Hogwarts were filmed in the magnificent medieval cloisters, while some of the impressive statues in the abbey’s grand hall have a distinct Potteresque feel.

2. Resembling or characteristic of English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist Dennis Potter (1935–1994).
   • 1984, Brian Walden, “Potter and Potterism”, in Andrew Billen, Mark Skipworth, editors, Oxford Type: An Anthology of Isis, the Oxford University Magazine, Robson Books, →ISBN, page 156:

     Dennis Potter has now defeated this shabby scheme by exposing it, though we must not be too sure that he has actually done us a good turn, because in the next sentence he tells us that the whole dirty deal ‘is an understandable and sometimes legitimate one within the framework and momentum of gradualist and democratic Socialism’. This typically Potteresque method of stating the case leaves us in some doubt as to whether, overwhelmed by nausea, he is condemning the transaction, or whether he regards it as a necessary bit of business.

   • 1994, Pauline Kael, For Keeps, Dutton, →ISBN, page 1085:

     But Millar, the director, who has a lovely touch with Dodgson and the Dean’s little daughters, doesn’t seem to know what to make of Potter’s quirky affection for Hollywood’s exhausted conventions, and Mrs. Hargreaves’ Potteresque adventures in the Art Deco New York wonderland have wobbly tonalities.

   • 1998, Glen Creeber, “‘Reality or Nothing’?: Dennis Potter’s Cold Lazarus”, in Mike Wayne, editor, Dissident Voices: The Politics of Television and Cultural Change, London, Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, →ISBN, page 21:

     Because Daniel’s memory does not remember events in a logical and chronological manner, we are given the past through a series of typically Potteresque ‘flashbacks’ and ‘flash forwards’.

   • 1998 December 14, The Independent, page 17, column 2:

     Four years after the Continental breakfast he made of Alan Ayckbourn’s Smokmg/No Smoking comes this rattling merry-go-round of romantic intrigue, “inspired by the work of Dennis Potter”, and featuring a lot of Potteresque lip-synching to popular French show tunes.

   • 2005, John Kenneth Muir, Singing a New Tune: The Rebirth of the Modern Film Musical, from Evita to De-Lovely and Beyond, Applause Theatre, →ISBN, page 248:

     The musical elements comment on a character’s need for his escape, counterbalance his feelings of entrapment, and also, in typical Potteresque style, reveal the influences of pop culture on a particular soul.

   • 2007, Richard Armstrong, Tom Charity, Lloyd Hughes, Jessica Winter, The Rough Guide to Film, Rough Guides, →ISBN, page 430, column 1:

     The film boasts a militantly capricious and typically Potteresque innovation: all the characters speak in iambic pentameter.

   • 2010, Jefferson Hunter, English Filming, English Writing, Bloomington, Ind., Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 274:

     Working with more resources than were available when Pennies from Heaven was shot (and of course with the benefit of experience gained on that project), working with somewhat more freshness than apparently remained for the production of Lipstick on Your Collar, Potter and Jon Amiel together assembled musical scenes of a remarkable complexity. These do not exactly culminate the tradition of music in film examined in this chapter. They are too idiosyncratic and Potteresque for that, too dependent on their special technique of lip-synching; and anyway “tradition” may not be the term for the loosely related performances I have been describing.

3. Resembling or characteristic of English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist Beatrix Potter (1866–1943).

   Synonyms: Beatrix Potteresque, Beatrix Potterish

   • 1974 March 6, Jennifer Farley Smith, The Christian Science Monitor, page F2; quoted in Ann Block and Carolyn Riley, editors, Children’s Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People, volume 1, Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Company, 1976, →ISBN, page 154, column 2:

     The story is purely “Potteresque”: a morality tale in which the inescapable moral is neatly evaded. . . . Beatrix Potter’s tongue-in-cheek humor is still as fresh as it was in 1903.

   • 1987, Katharine Hill, Ladies’ Chain, Love Stories Ltd., →ISBN, page 80:

     Miss Lloyd, becomingly arrayed in dull pink, sat behind the big table looking very like a Beatrix Potter mouse. […] More Potteresque than ever, Miss Lloyd rocked back on her chair, peeling with merriment, as though it were the greatest of jokes, then broke off in ladylike confusion.

   • 2000, Heather Hay Ffrench, Great British Food, London: Quiller Press, →ISBN, page 109:

     With the growth of interest in rare breeds, the Herdwick sheep seems set for a major revival. Beatrix Potter spent considerable time, and money, improving the strains of Herdwick in her day, whether inspired by their quaint white faces – very ‘Potteresque’ or the excellent quality of their mutton, is a debatable point.

   • 2002 August 31, “Cute”, in The Economist, page 40, column 2:

     But kawai might also be the very quality the Japanese respond to in Mr Beckham—and cuteness of a peculiarly Potteresque kind at that. Just look at his World Cup-period hairdo: a straight steal from the pages of Beatrix Potter, surely, combining the two-toned contrast of Tommy Brock and the spiky quiff of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

   • 2013, Oliver Berry, Fionn Davenport, Marc Di Duca, Belinda Dixon, Peter Dragicevich, David Else, Damian Harper, Anna Kaminski, Catherine Le Nevez, Fran Parnell, Andy Symington, Neil Wilson, Discover Great Britain, Lonely Planet, →ISBN, page 216:

     The delightful cottage of Hill Top was Beatrix Potter's first house in the Lake District, and it features in lots of her books and illustrations, making it a must for Potter fans. Admission includes an informative guided tour with one of the house's guides, but half the fun is spotting all the tiny Potteresque details for yourself.

• “Potteresque”, in Collins English Dictionary.