“Trust Me”: Volatile Markets in Twilight and The Hunger Games
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Journal Title
CR: The New Centennial Review
ISSN
1539-6630
Publisher
Michigan State University Press
Volume
19
Issue
1
Pages
205-227
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Flynn, M., & Hardstaff, S. (2019). “Trust Me”: Volatile Markets in Twilight and The Hunger Games. CR: The New Centennial Review, 19 (1), 205-227. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723505
Abstract
When Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games was published in 2008 it was critically praised as the ‘antidote’ to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, with Collins’s Katniss Everdeen heralded as the active feminist agent to counter Meyer’s passive Bella Swan. Meyer’s series drew to a close as Collins’s began, both in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Both series are compellingly connected to speculative finance. The Hunger Games caught the imagination of youth punished and excluded by a crash they did not cause, while facing uncertainty about the future; economist Noreena Hertz has dubbed today’s youth ‘Generation K’ after Katniss (2016). Meanwhile, critiques of Twilight’s Edward Cullen as “compensated psychopath” (Merskin 2011, 157) echo post-crash rhetoric on the role played by the finance sector’s “monstrous” hypermasculinity (Shaw 2015, 90). Indeed, when EL James rewrote Twilight as Fifty Shades of Gray, her original working title was ‘Master of the Universe’ (Domet 2013, 115), a phrase inseparable from depictions of the (male) speculator.
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AHRC (1517316)
Identifiers
External link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723505
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288170
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