"Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje's Fiction is a comprehensive study of the novels of the Sri Lankan-Canadian author and poet, Michael Ondaatje. This survey of the Booker Prize winning novelist's works locates him as a powerful voice that urges globalization and multiculture in a world that is closing its borders. It reconnoitres Ondaatje's search for a homeland by cracking open the core of his evocative, inventive, and innovative concepts that undergird his art of storytelling. The contributors in this volume examine themes such as literary cosmopolitanism, Sri Lankan identity, diasporic identity, race and racism, home and belonging, trauma in the Sri Lankan civil war, and war games and uncertainty theory. An important contribution to Ondaatje studies, the book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of Sri Lankan literature, diasporic and world literatures, South Asian and Canadian studies, cultural studies, postcolonial fiction, and history"--
Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction is a comprehensive study of the novels of the Sri Lankan-Canadian author and poet, Michael Ondaatje. This survey of the Booker Prize winning novelist’s works locates him as a powerful voice that urges globalization and multiculture in a world that is closing its borders. It reconnoitres Ondaatje’s search for a homeland by cracking open the core of his evocative, inventive, and innovative concepts that undergird his art of storytelling. The contributors in this volume examine themes such as literary cosmopolitanism, Sri Lankan identity, diasporic identity, race and racism, home and belonging, trauma in the Sri Lankan civil war, and war games and uncertainty theory.
An important contribution to Ondaatje studies, the book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of Sri Lankan literature, diasporic and world literatures, South Asian and Canadian studies, cultural studies, postcolonial fiction, and history.
Between Homelands in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction is a comprehensive study of the novels of the Sri Lankan-Canadian author and poet, Michael Ondaatje. This survey of the Booker Prize winning novelist’s works locates him as a powerful voice that urges globalization and multiculture in a world that is closing its borders.
Introduction: In Search of Home PART ONE: THE LOST FATHERLAND
1.
Gothic Detection in Anils Ghost
2. Intimate Words: Intertextuality in
Running in the Family PART TWO: MYTH, RACE, AND SUBVERSION
3. Idiosyncratic
Histories: Revisionist Mythopoetics in The English Patient
4. Subversive Art
and History in The English Patient and Divisadero 5.The Colonized Sikh
Warrior in The English Patient PART THREE: SONGS FROM THE HOOD
6. Jazzing
Up the Facts in Coming Through Slaughter: Ondaatjes Fictional Archive
7.
Predatory Violence and Abuse of State Power in Billy the Kid
8. An
Unprivileged Place: Journeying Selves in The Cats Table PART FOUR: TRAUMA IN
SRI LANKAN CIVIL WAR HISTORY
9. An Invented Past: Representation of History
in Anils Ghost
10. Connected by Tunnels of Light: Reading Care in Anils
Ghost PART FIVE: WAR, GAMES, POKER, AND UNCERTAINTY 11.Teens, Trolls, and
Toxic Games in Divisadero
12. Triad of Chance, Risk, and Security: Postwar
Uncertainty in Warlight
Julie Banerjee Mehta holds MA and PhD degrees in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on the works of Michael Ondaatje and where she conceptualized and taught the Chancellor-endowed course on Asian Literatures and Cultures in Canada. Currently, she is a guest faculty at Loreto College, Kolkata. Her translation of Tagores play Dak Ghar/Post Office was performed by Pleiades Theatre, Toronto, in 2010, to critical acclaim and earned her the title of One of Sixteen Most Influential South Asians in Canada. She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodia Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. Her research essays have appeared in books by Oxford University Press, University of Toronto Press, and Rodopi.
Harish C. Mehta has an MA and a PhD in History from McMaster University, Canada, in the history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia. He did graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and taught history at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Trent University. He is the author, most recently, of Peoples Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 19651972, and of three books on Cambodian history. His research articles have appeared in International History Review, Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, The Historian, and History Compass. He has twice won the Samuel Flagg Bemis research award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is currently editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Rising Asia Journal (www.rajraf.org).
