Braving a new world? Adolescent heroes facing an adult-shaped universe in three YA dystopias (The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent)

The plots of the three dystopian trilogies examined in this article – The Hunger Games (2008-2010, written by Suzanne Collins), The Maze Runner (2009-2011, written by James Dashner), and Divergent (2011-2013, written by Veronica Roth) – consist of describing how teenage heroes (and their peers) initiate and lead the rebellion, manage to overthrow oppressive systems, and build new worlds from scratch. This paper demonstrates that, despite adhering to the conventions of the dystopian genre, these novels break new ground within that tradition by offering unique critical and political uses of speculative fiction. To achieve the analysis of the worlds described in these novels, this paper follows this outline: first, we present the characteristics of worldbuilding in the three trilogies; secondly, we linger on the distinctive «topofocal» (place-focused) in which the young heroes are initially placed; thirdly, we analyze their process of empowerment through the medium of resistance and praxis against the oppressive actions of adults and how it drives them to try to change the world in which they live. This lead us, finally, to analyze these novels as representations of different political ideologies and exercises of power.