Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a well-accomplished novel that won countless awards and became a part of the canon soon after publication in 1985. This dystopian fiction circles around Offred, a handmaid living under a totalitarian regime. The subjects in this regime are meticulously monitored. Power is exercised vastly on every terrain it has access to in this dystopia. This paper investigates the vehicles of power in light of the contemporary media scholar and cultural critic John Fiske’s cultural theories. Language, a significant terrain of power, is analysed both as a vehicle of power and an opposing force. Furthermore, we will illuminate how pleasure and discipline are involved in the exercise of power within the Republic of Gilead. In The Handmaid’s Tale, resistance is still producing itself even under a totalitarian government, and the subjects under that regime constantly display resistance wherever possible. Therefore, they can be considered neither as neutral objects nor as commodities. Moreover, we will demonstrate how pleasure is a significant cause for subordination of and resistance by the subjects. Lastly, this article elucidates how subjects resist the dominant power through Guerrilla Tactics.

This article illuminates the definition of the Victorian upper-class woman following the dominant gender roles and conventions of the late Victorian era in the context of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Relying on Butlerian analyses of sex and gender, Victorian female subjectivity has been investigated. I have studied two opposing representations related to Victorian upper-class female subjects. The first view of Victorian upper-class female subjects concerns the representation of intelligible-gendered identities that are represented in the Duchess of Berwick. As opposed to this, an unintelligible-gendered character is studied, who in this case was Mrs Erlynne, to illuminate the consequences of opposing the dominant power. This article illuminates that Wilde’s female ideal is neither intelligible-gendered nor unintelligible-gendered; she is someone who resists power and recoils upon feeling existential threats to her social status. Wilde’s ideal woman, I argue, is a semi-intelligible-gendered identity. Moreover, this article postulates that although Wilde is a supporter of women’s rights, he is still in favour of some specific gender roles and female/male binary oppositions, among which is the role of motherhood. Wilde illustrates a scenario in which breaking away from these social conventions would lead to a tragic end which no woman is able to escape.

The aim of this article is to illustrate how power works within Behn’s Oroonoko in light of New Historicism. Behn’s standpoint concerning slavery is quite unsettling, many arguments have been proposed concerning this issue. It is intended to shed light on how slavery is perceived for Behn and through her outlook, it becomes possible to illustrate how English colonialising power acts in opposition to whatever that aims to subvert it. Discourse is a vehicle of power and in this paper, many discourses are analysed to depict the essence of power. Language through discourses has managed to control and reproduce what is known as the truth. By shaping the truth in alliance to the dominant power it becomes possible to subvert and contain the opposing resistance. This article illuminates how truth is shaped for the subjects of power (mainly Oroonoko and his Wife) by the proposed discourses of the narrator who is also considered as Behn herself.

The present inquiry endeavors to scrutinize the process of identity formation with regard to the Culture/Nature dichotomy within the milieu of Lois Lowry's post-apocalyptic dystopian narrative, The Giver. The antipodal forces of Culture and Nature are instrumental in shaping the social subjectivities of individuals. Lowry's post-apocalyptic dystopia portrays a society in which these antitheses are comprehensively epitomized. Our objective is to explicate the genesis of post-apocalyptic identities and to elucidate the representation of Nature/Culture within the social context of the aforementioned literary work. Furthermore, the polarity between power and resistance, which is of notable import to cultural studies, is nonexistent within this post-apocalyptic dystopia. Consequently, the establishment of identities transpires not at the site of contention between power and resistance, but exclusively through the ascendency of the imperializing power. As a corollary, the elimination of the recollections of those individuals who are unable to oppose the imperializing power is integral to the construction of homogeneous identities.

Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are not as well-recognised as his novel or his dramatic works. This paper circles around two of his tales, The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose. Through a postmodernist outlook, this study postulates the vigorous diatribe of Wilde against the consumer culture which was dominant within Victorian society. Wilde asserts that the Victorian mind-set claims that happiness is attainable through accumulating signs of affluence and he ironically mocks this notion of happiness which is entitled to commodified objects. To him, happiness is defined through a strict sense of Christian morality and Christ-like love and kindness. His aesthetic views are entangled with morality and he fails to celebrate art for art’s sake. Moreover, this study asserts that Wilde is aware of the dominant language games, and his application of the technical language game for the Prince, the Nightingale, and the Swallow is in debt to his monolithic morality or his opportunistic character. At last, Wilde refuses to celebrate beauty if morality is absent and in this way, his aesthetic concerns become rather contradictory.