as the canon is shaped by white male standards rewriting the canonical works of literature is one of the ways through which postcolonial writers subvert the authority of the masters. writing in the language of the masters the colonized writers use the very suppressive tool in the hands of the masters i.e. their language to question the validity of their norms. regarded by most critics to be the beginner of realism robinson crusoe was accepted to the canon as a masterpiece. although he is apparently trying to civilize friday, crusoe is actually a white master who makes friday his slave by the strategy of naming and using the suppressing power of language. coetzee’s novel foe on the other hand is the critique of defoe’s colonialism. as an african novelist writing in english he uses the language of the masters to subvert their discourse of power. foe is an exemplary works of resistance in that not only is it a revision of a canonical work but also the characters in the novel are resistant to the masters this study compares the postcolonial issues in these two novels especially as they are related to the notions of language, identity, master/slave dialectic and women, having in the background mostly those ideas of edward said, franz fanon, homi k. bhabha , gayatri spivak and henry louis gates which are related to the notions of cultural suppression and resistance. being a historiographic metafiction as linda hutcheon would call it. foe will also be analyzed in terms of her ideas in a poetics of postmodernism. therefore, this thesis will compare robinson cruso and foe focusing on colonization and decolonization as their main themes and the way coetzee manages to counteract the discursive power of defoe’s. novel by applying postmodern techniques of writing key words: postcolonial, historiographic metafiction, suppression, resistance, foe, robison crusoe