This work seeks to assess the way newly-independent Croatia’s first democratically-elected government led by then-President Franjo Tuđman’s party (HDZ) sought to build and exert control over the field of culture as a mean to legitimize its authoritarian hold on power through the example of literature. To do so, the Master’s thesis builds upon a theoretical framework critically derived from the literary sociology program outlined by Pierre Bourdieu as well as the concept of “governmentality” coined by philosopher and social scientist Michel Foucault. This leads us to define the way a particular regime, that is a power structure reaching beyond the sole state apparatus, might seek to legitimize or deligitimize particular writers and works as well as to rewrite the pre-existing literary canon to “nationalize” it, with the final end being the legitimation of the regime’s narratives and thus hold on power. The empirical core of the work revolves around two chapters: the first outlines how the HDZ-led regime conceptualized culture within the public sphere, how this conceptualization evolved through varying socio-political contexts and governmental strategies, as well as how actors within the regime might have have relatively confrontational understandings of it. The second empirical chapter seeks to operationalize the concept of “cultural governmentality” in two way – first, through the “building of power” by the regime over the state-structure, school institution, mass-media, and major cultural institutions; second, through the “exercise of power”, as we analyze what narratives and authors or groups of authors were promoted ad canonized, how authors belonging to the Yugoslav canon were “Croatianized” to fit the regime’s narrative, which authors were the victims of defamation campaigns as to delegitimize them and how, and finally how regime-related actors debated the modification of literature school curricula.