The Construction of a Literary Classic The Handmaid’s Tale within the Field of Power

Ziwei YAN

Abstract


Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, published 35 years ago, unexpectedly hits the Bestseller list in 2017 and is recognized as a literary classic. To investigate how the novel is constructed to be the classic, this thesis applies Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, as well as his conclusion that the literary field is actually contained within and dominated by the field of power which camouflages itself with symbolic capital to illustrate that the classicalization of the novel is not only dependent on the artistic features of the work itself, but also a joint result of political capital and economic capital.


Keywords


The Handmaid’s Tale; Literary classic; Field; Capital

Full Text:

PDF

References


Atwood, M. (2018). The handmaid’s tale. Vintage Books.

Bloom, H. (1994). The western canon: The books and school of the ages. Harcourt Brace & Company.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). On television (Priscilla Parkburst Ferguson, Trans.). Viking.

Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. (1980, May). The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods. Media Culture Society, 30(3), 261.

Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, Loi’c J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. The U of Chicago.

Bowden, J. (2019). Handmaid’s Tale’ author says US under Trump getting more Gilead-like. The Hill, 16 Nov. 2019, Retrieved from Http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/386382-handmaids-tale-author-says-us-under-trump-getting-more-gilead.

Bradley, L. (2019). Margaret atwood has ‘Done Some Yelling’ Over the Handmaid’s Tale TV series. Vanity Fair, 5 May 2019, Retrieved from Http:// www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/09/margaret-atwood-the-testaments-handmaids-tale.

Chasma, Jessica r. (2019). Elisabeth Moss compares ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ to Trump’s America: ‘We’re losing our country. The Washington Times, 8 April 2019, Retrieved from Http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/8/elisabeth,moss-compares-handmaids-tale-trumps-amer/

Donohue, B. (2020). Big gap in where the candidates stand on catholic issues. CNS News, 5 Oct. 2020. Retrieved from Http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/bill-donohue/big-gap-where-candidates-stand-catholic-issues

Foucault , M. (1990). The history of sexuality. Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1998). Key Concepts (D. Taylor, Ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Howell, A. (2019). Breaking silence, bearing witness, and voicing defiance: the resistant female voice in the trans media story world of The Handmaid’s Tale. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 38(2), 96-104.

Howells, C. A. (2006). The Cambridge companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge U P..

Johnson, R. (Ed.) (1993). The field of cultural production. Columbia U P.

Knaggs, P. (2018). Reflections of a Handmaid’s Tale. Abortion punishable by death. Labour Heart Lands, 21 Nov. 2018. Retrieved from Http://www. labourheartlands.com/reflections-of-a-handmaids-tale-abortion-punishable-by-death/.

Liptak, A. (2017). Sales of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale have soared since Trump’s win. The Verge, 11 Feb 2017, Retrieved from Http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/11/14586382/sales-margaret-atwoods-handmaids-tale-soared-donald-trump.

Marghitu, S., & Johnson, K. M. (1980). Feminist online responses against the U.S. Alt-right: Using The Handmaid’s Tale as a symbol and catalyst of resistance. Communication Culture & Critique, 23(3), 18-26.

Mayer, P. (2018). Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Soars To Top of Amazon Bestseller List. NPR News, 8 Oct. 2018, Retrieved from Http://www.npr.org/2017/02/07/513957906/margaret-atwoods-the-handmaids-tale-soars-to-top-of-amazon-bestseller-list?t=1608073022737.

Milligan, S. (2019). Where the 2020 Candidates Stand on Abortion Rights. US News, 11 Oct. 2019. Retrieved from Http://www.usnews.com/elections/abortion-2020.

Mukherjee, A. (2010, May). “What Is a Classic?”: International literary criticism and the classic question. Modern Language Association of America, 125(4), 1028.

Mulraney, F. (2017). Irish pro-choice abortion group protest wearing chilling Handmaid’s Tale costumes. Irish Central, 22 Sep 2017. Retrieved from Http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/irish-abortion-handmaids-tale.

Nguyen, A. (2019). Why Margaret Atwood waited more than 30 years to write The Testaments. The Current. 5 Sep 2019. Retrieved from Http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-september-6-2019-1.5271819/why-margaret-atwood-waited-more-than-30-years-to-write-the-testaments-1.5271822.

Nice, R. (Trans.) (2002). The logic of practice. Penguin.

Norris, S. (2006). The booker prize: A Bourdieusian perspective. Journal for Cultural Research, 10(2), 24-45.

Richardson, J. (Ed.) (1986). The forms of capital. Greenwood.

Susan Emanuel, S. (Trans.) (1996). The rules of art——Genesis and structure of literary field. Stanford U P.

Tong, Q. B., & Tao, D. F. (2002). The construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of literary classics. Peking U P.

Tong, Q. B., & Tao, D. F. (2012). Construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of literary classics. Kindle edition of Peking University Press.

Wu, X. (2019). A study on literature and its communication in the new media era -- Taking the adaptation of the handmaid’s tale as an example. (MA dissertation). Shenzhen University.

Zhang, C. X. (2018, Sept.). Mutual benefit between Film and Books—Take the handmaid’s tale as an example. Editors Monthly, 5(3), 138-145.

Zhang, Y. (2019). The handmaid’s tale season 1—An ironic allusion to the challenges facing contemporary American women. (MA dissertation). Sichuan International Studies University.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12119

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2021 Canadian Social Science

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Reminder

  • How to do online submission to another Journal?
  • If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

  • Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/css/submission/wizard

  • Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
  • We only use four mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Canadian Social Science are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 

Canadian Social Science Editorial Office

Address: 1020 Bouvier Street, Suite 400, Quebec City, Quebec, G2K 0K9, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail:caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net

Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture