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s well reflected in his text. The “historicity of text” refers to the fact that all texts are related to material and ideological existence in society, which implies the specific historical nature. By the historicity of texts, Montrose means to suggest “the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing—not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them” (20). The historical, social and material contents of all writing and reading forms are the concrete embodiment of the history of texts. First, literary texts are deeply influenced by historical, social, and political factors, which in turn form the basic context in which literary texts are produced. Moreover, the text is not only a reflection of the social and political environment, but also an integral part of history, accelerating social and historical development. Montrose argues that these texts are produced in a certain context in which the imprints of historical and social circumstances are integrated into the text. Literary works are configured in the context of historical and social factors and in turn play a role in shaping history and society at the same time. 

As a Sri Lankan-Canadian writer, Ondaatje’s literary expressions are always uniquely historical, always expressing a certain contradiction between society and material things. Ondaatje is good at exploring the social contradictions in history, especially in the history of war, to show the essence and truth of human history. In Running the Family, Ondaatje shows the influence of colonial war on the decline of the family by tracing his memories. The English Patient focuses on the plight of four people in the background of the Second World War. In his novel Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje pays great attention to his hometown—Sri Lanka, takes the history of Sri Lanka as his own duty, and takes the period of civil war as the background of the story. Like the author, Anil was born and raised in Sri Lanka, where she left to further her education and start her forensic career—first in Britain and then in the U.S. Their trajectories also overlap in another way: after a prolonged absence—fifteen years in Anil’s case, twenty-five years in Ondaatje’s—each undertakes a journey back to his homeland (Marinkova 109). The novel integrates real historical events and fictional plots together, and makes history materialized by the technique of combing the virtual and the real. It shows the brutality of Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s and 1990s, and the social conflicts it triggered. 

B. Questioning: The Reality of Sri Lankan Civil War

Questioning the reality and objectivity of history is one of the views of the New Historicism. As Montrose holds the “we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence” (20), in the postmodern context, the traditional meaning of history no longer exists and is no longer treated as an objective existence; history essentially exists in the form of a text. And historical discourse, like literature, is produced through narration and interpretation with the help of language and words, and the textuality of history is highlighted. Montrose suggests that 

“Those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are constructed as the “documents” upon which historians ground their own texts, called “histories.” As Hayden White has forcefully remind本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。