TY - JOUR ID - 77944 TI - The Fourth World and Politics of Social Identity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy JO - Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies JA - WSPS LA - en SN - 2588-3119 AU - Masoomi, Maryam AU - Bornaki, Fatemeh AU - Salami, Ali AD - M.A. Student of English Literature, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. AD - Department of English Literature, Faculty of Literature and Foreign Languages, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran AD - Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Y1 - 2019 PY - 2019 VL - 3 IS - 4 SP - 731 EP - 761 KW - fourth world KW - Identity Manipulation KW - Information Age KW - Media KW - Network Society KW - power DO - 10.22059/wsps.2020.296221.1133 N2 - With the advent of the 21st century, the way characters and identities interact under the influence of dominant powers has brought a new world into existence, a world dubbed by Manuel Castells as the ‘Fourth World’. Within the Castellsian theoretical matrix of the Fourth World and politics of identity, the present study seeks to investigate the true nature of the futuristic world Margaret Atwood hascreated in the MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy literarily reflects a global crisis that ultimately leads to dystopia and the destruction of the human race: what remains of humanity is a small group of survivors who must struggle to conserve what remains of humanity. Identity as the main determining factor in the Fourth World represents personal and public privileges, characteristics, and means of differentiating oneself from others. The Fourth World and its political peculiarities reflect contemporary powers, i.e. the power of the network society, network communication and media. Humankind, in this wheel, is just a toy in the hands of an intelligence broker. What exactly happens to human and semi-human characters in Atwood’s trilogy is the result of Fourth World structures andvalues, and how they shape and reconstruct identities to lead the world toward fabricated truths and values, and terminate in dystopia. UR - https://wsps.ut.ac.ir/article_77944.html L1 - https://wsps.ut.ac.ir/article_77944_cb2a2c3602ffb44c4058c420c9ca3b52.pdf ER -