Alice's Academy

Caroline Jones, editor

Introduction: From the gingerbread house to the cornucopia: gastronomic utopia as social critique in Homecoming and The Hunger Games

Caroline Jones

In “Alice’s Academy” for this issue, Sarah Hardstaff explores a theme common in children’s literature: hunger, and its connections to child empowerment and disempowerment in society. Hardstaff crosses generic lines, looking at realistic fiction, dystopian fiction, and fairy tales as she explores the differing contexts of each, and how hunger and plenty affect the agency of protagonists as well as the hunger of the reader or hearer in differing circumstances. More specifically, she explores hunger as the driver of change, and the vehicle for protagonists to effect change in their lives and their worlds.

In this period of change and flux across the globe, Hardstaff’s exploration raises pertinent questions for us all: what change will we see in our world? For what do we hunger? How can we help ourselves, and children, to become drivers of that change? And, finally, how can we make hunger a thing of theory, not reality?

Caroline Jones

Volume 19, Issue 1, The Looking Glass, August 2016

Site design and content, except where noted, © The Looking Glass 2016.
"Introduction: From the gingerbread house to the cornucopia: gastronomic utopia as social critique in Homecoming and The Hunger Games" © Caroline Jones, 2016.

Send general correspondence regarding The Looking Glass c/o The Editor (editor@the-looking-glass.net)