The Hunger Games Spectacle, Risk and the Girl Action Hero Cinema and Youth Cultures Series

The 2012 film The Hunger Games and its three sequels, appearing quickly over the following three years, represent one of the most successful examples of the contemporary popularity of youth-oriented speculative film and television series. This book considers "The Hunger Games" as an intertextual field centred on this blockbuster film franchise but also encompassing the successful novels that preceded them and the merchandised imagery and the critical and fan discourse that surrounds them. It explores the place of The Hunger Games in the history of youth-oriented cinema; in the history of speculative fiction centred on adolescents; in a network of continually evolving and tightly connected popular genres; and in the popular history of changing ideas about girlhood from which a successful action hero like Katniss Everdeen could emerge.

Introduction ‘The Hunger Games’

Chapter 1 Choose Your Own Adventure: Survival, Adulthood and Other Fantasies

Chapter 2 Katniss Everdeen, Girl Hero

Chapter 3 The Train from District 12: Panem as Dystopia

Chapter 4 Team Katniss: In the Arena of Romance

Chapter 5 ‘The Hunger Memes’: Film, Fans, and Speculation as Critique

Catherine Driscoll is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on youth and girl culture, popular culture, modernity, and rural cultural studies. She is also author of Girls, Modernist Cultural Studies, Teen Film, and The Australian Country Girl.

Alexandra Heatwole is a researcher in media and gender studies, specialising in girl studies, youth culture, speculative fictions, and sexuality and reproductive technology. Since her doctorate, Renegotiating the Heroine: Postfeminism on the Speculative Screen (Sydney, 2015), she has published on princess culture and girl heroes.