Michael Ondaatje's Fiction: Poetics of Exile

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The Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje is a powerful presence among contemporary writers and especially among the diaspora. His poetics traverse diverse terrains, times, and genres, while working across histories, memories, and spaces, opening up pathways between life and art. This book explores the multiple dimensions of Ondaatje's works and presents a critique of his poetics in the larger context of the poetics of exile: a theoretical approach of significance in the works of the writers who live away fromtheir cultures of origin, illustrative of the way in which writers inhabit, adopt, and interpret cultures as they open up spaces of negotiations between the hitherto segregated worlds. Not only is the book an in-depth study of Ondaatje's fiction, such as The English Patient and Anil's Ghost, but it moves beyond them to look closely at his poetry and his negotiations of myths from other cultures, as in Billy the Kid and In the Skin of the Lion. The book also provides an insightful analysis of his latest work, Divisadero, adding to the overall view of the writer's engagement with the problematics of self and the other. The book adds a comprehensive critique to the Ondaatje critical corpus as a whole and to the poetics of exile in particular.