These proceedings of the symposium 'The Rhetoric of Sociopolitical Power and Representations of Victim-hood in Contemporary Literature,' conducted by the Department of American Culture and Literature at Haliç University, Istanbul, on 13-15 April 2005 contain discussions of power and victimization as represented in contemporary literatures in light of the leading questions and issues in contemporary literary criticism, the emphasis being on writing from the Anglophone world. The authors treated include Angela Carter, Colm Toibin, Alan Hollinghurst, Tony Harrison, Henry James, David Mamet, Anne Sexton, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, J. M. Coetzee, Jean Anouilh, Thomas Mann, Ricardo Piglia, Luisa Valenzuela, Naguib Mahfouz, Kemal Yalçın, Orhan Pamuk, Kobo Abe.