Book Historian Explains Why Some Famous Novels Have Different Titles in Britain and the US

By dhahn ()

Back in the late 1990s, when the first Harry Potter book was becoming a global phenomenon, children in Britain and the United States were actually reading two different books–okay, the content of the books was (mostly) the same, but the titles were [...]different: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone" in the UK, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" in the US. From Jane Austin to Agatha Christie, it turns out that this kind of thing has been happening for centuries, although not always for the same reasons. Joseph Rezek, Boston University associate professor of English and director of BU's American and New England Studies program, is both a scholar of literature and a book historian. In our video mini-explainer, Rezek breaks down the complex history behind why the same book often ends up with different titles in Britain and the United States.
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