ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Reimagining the New World: Exploration of Power Dynamics and Politics in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Hunger Games (2008)

Dystopian literature, which has always been seen as speculative literature, has created an indisputable space for itself in recent times. There is an inevitable alliance between fact-fiction, history-literature, and arts-political science, and the paper speculates the alliance between the selected dystopian fiction and contemporary global politics. The paper seeks to explore the symbols of power structure depicted in the selected dystopian fiction and intends to address a warning against the imminent doom which human beings are sure to inflict upon themselves due to their vile and corrupt practices to attain power. A descriptive contextual analysis has been implemented on the selected texts using Marxist and Foucauldian theories to identify the similarities between the contemporary power symbols bearing socio-political issues and the power symbols represented in the selected literary texts titled, The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale.