![]() This article explores ways to utilize students’ interest in fantasy literature to support critical literacy. ![]() By recognizing the mythical and archetypal situations, which are subverted or inverted in the novel, Collins revises the significance of private and public achievements in the contemporary community. During her heroic enterprise, Katniss turns inward, discovers and embraces her feminine nature and seeks a satisfactory life paradigm as a result of which she attains the inner integration and reconciliation of both masculine and feminine aspects of her personality she also understands and accomplishes her purpose in life. This study presents Collins's protagonist, Katniss, who embarks on the traditional heroic quest and confronts multiple challenges and frustrations on her journey to success. This research focuses on the novelist's attempt to redefine the monomyth in terms of gender, and on the ways in which Collins's retold version represents human experience in the contemporary world. Suzanne Collins' novel The Hunger Games has as its central metaphor the monomythic journey of the hero. While unacknowledged by the author and so far unregistered in critical studies of the novels, Collins’s extensive borrowing from Coriolanus across the three instalments of her science fiction adventure amounts to a consistent and comprehensive reframing of Shakespeare’s hunger paradigm, here remoulded into cautionary dystopia about the social and political order of the global era. This essay deals with a very recent take on Coriolanus by investigating the Shakespearean palimpsest within Suzanne Collins’s highly popular The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010). ![]() Shakespeare’s politicization of hunger has played a crucial role in securing and shaping Coriolanus’s afterlife. From the very early moments of the tragedy, Shakespeare’s emphasis on hunger as a literal, material condition is paralleled by a probing investigation of the rhetorical and metaphorical dimension of alimentary imagery and its problematic applicability, and actual application, in the political sphere – most notably, in Menenius Agrippa’s fable of the belly, a rhetorical attempt at naturalizing social inequality which however fails to appease the plebeians’ threatened uprising against the Roman aristocracy. The novels thus offer up a variety of maternal models, which make it possible for readers to negotiate their own understanding of mothering.Ī play saturated with images of food, eating and being eaten, Coriolanus provides the most thoroughgoing exploration of the hunger paradigm within the Shakespearean corpus. Ultimately, it could be argued that Katniss’ mother achieves a maternal role that is more transgressive and liberating than that of her daughter. Analysing the text within the framework of voluntary childlessness as female liberation as well as the difference between “will” and “consent” in relation to reproduction, I suggest that Katniss’ submission and subsequent emotional distress articulate an ambivalent attitude towards motherhood. It is suggested throughout the novels that Katniss does not want to have children, and the final decision is framed in terms of (ultimately futile) resistance on her part and coercion on Peeta’s. ![]() I further interrogate the epilogue, but not, as other scholars have done, from the point of view of the supposed domestication of Katniss, but from the character’s lack of agency and choice. Drawing on literary and sociological research, I suggest a different reading of both characters, in which the narrative allows Katniss’ mother to explore a way of mothering that allows for maternal subjectivity, complexity of character and reconciliation of personal growth with motherhood. Conversely, Katniss’ marriage and maternity have been read as a heteronormative cop-out, undoing the character’s gender-transcending work. Characterised by scholars as weak, despondent and overly feminine, Katniss’ mother has been criticised as a failure, abdicating from her maternal role. If, as has been argued, young adult literature affects how readers “on the cusp of adulthood” consider society and their place in it (Basu et al.), the way mothers and mothering are represented in the novels may have a substantial impact on the readers’ identity formation. The novels depict a range of maternal models, some traditional and conservative, some transgressive. This chapter investigates and problematises representations of motherhood in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games-trilogy.
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