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Abstract

Voice, Rites and Roles: Young Readers on Converged Literature

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the production of dystopian literature for young adults, in which the sixteen-year-old protagonist must face a turning-point in life. A number of these dystopian texts have been made into films and have given rise to a whole industry; a contemporary convergence culture, in which texts flow between media platforms. These texts have experienced tremendous national and international commercial success.

The aim of this article is to present perspectives on converged literature in fan communities on the dystopian Hunger Games and Divergent series. This article analyses three recurrent themes and concerns: the rite of passage, roles and voice. Here, I analyse the literary texts themselves (in particular, the first volume in each series) and posts on two discussion forums, in an attempt to adopt an approach combining the study of texts and contexts through literary analysis and cultural studies.

As the primary material for this study consisted of posts from two online fan forums dedicated to The Hunger Games series and the Divergent series, netnography proved a useful tool. Netnography explores activity and self-representation in social networking sites, in order to provide data on complex social and cultural practices, relationships, and the use of language and symbols. The netnographer collects publicly available archival data for text and image analysis. Methodologically, netnography enables scholars to ask pertinent questions regarding the correlation between activities taking place on social networking sites and other socially situated activities.

My results show that the themes and concerns analysed are discernible in both the literary texts and the posts on fan forums. Voice as a theme is closely connected with the expression of individual opinions, but it also arises in discussions of narratology. Rites of passage are generally discussed in relation to fictional characters. With regard to roles, participants in fan forums take on a number of different roles: as readers, critics, consumers, producers, and guardians of the texts they love.