States of Nostalgia in the Genre of the Future: Panem, Globalization, and Utopia in The Hunger Games Trilogy

Abstract

This chapter is a close analysis of the representation of post-apocalyptic North America (Panem) in the three novels comprising Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster The Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010). Smith and Korsnack argue that scholars have yet to consider the trilogy’s uneasy relation to the dystopian genre with which it is universally identified. Instead, they propose that a close consideration of the relationship between setting and genre in the series reveals points at which its dystopian critique lapses into other varieties of utopian form, specifically the anti-utopia and the conservative utopia.