The Hunger Games: Understanding the Dystopian Trend in Young Adult Literature

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The Hunger Games: Understanding the Dystopian Trend in Young Adult Literature Simply knowing that Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games has already become a global phenomenon is quite different from actually learning that its sales has now escalated to a skyrocketing 27.7 million copies worldwide, hence officially declaring the Panem fever as a large-scale pandemic. The said statistics was based on March 2012 figures, when all the hype over the books was heightened further owing to the release of the Lionsgate film adaptation, which splendidly grossed over 255 million-dollar ticket sales. Indeed, the back-to-back triumph of Collins’s masterpiece has now steered most bookstores to feature a special “Young-adult Dystopian” section to sate the emergent fascination of teenage readers to this particular literary genre. “Dystopias are grim, humorless, and hopeless — and incredibly appealing to today’s teens,” thus emphasized by Philip Reeve in his August 2011 article, “The Worst is yet to Come”. Undoubtedly, young-adult dystopian fiction is the face of today’s literary trend, as revealed by the overwhelming reception to books like The Hunger Games. Yet, as such, it has also gained as much condemnation as commendation. What most critics fail to realize is the purpose these novels are written: to let the youth — the leaders of the next generation — be critically aware of the real world problems as reflected by the models of dystopia. Dystopias, of course, are anything but new. In fact, because of the influence of many notable dystopian depictions, words like “Robot” (Karel Capek’s R. U. R., 1920), “Big Brother” (George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) and now — with the influx of The Hunger Games phenomenon — “Capitol” already spawned over our modern Cornelio 2 vocabulary. With its etymology tracing back from the Grecian phrase, dis topos (“bad place”), dystopia offers

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