英语论文网

Ondaatje is a contemporary writer with highly historical consciousness and has always shown his concern for history in his works. His novel, Anil’s Ghost, published in 2000, continues his postmodern narrative style. He spent many years collecting historical materials and including archaeological and forensic research in the book. Set against the background of a real historical event—Sri Lankan civil war, he revealed the nature of a country’s history and brutal humanity through the revelation of individual memories and fates in the novel. Sri Lanka, a traditional country steeped in Buddhism, has been carved up and slaughtered by sectarian powers amid a brutal civil war and racism. Studying Ondaatje’s historical writing of his hometown Sri Lanka from the perspective of Postmodernism and the New Historicism, is helpful to better understand his view of history. 
Anil’s Ghost is a work of writing and reflecting on the Sri Lankan civil war and its historical narration, with postmodern historical consciousness. The novel reveals the bloodshed and fragmentation of the “History”, while exploring the false illusion of the historical writing. In the minds of the old Historicism, authenticity of the historical facts is greater than literary imagination and fiction. And in the view of New Historicism, literature does not respond passively to historical facts, rather through the interpretation of the complex textual world to participate in the process of creating history, reveal the hidden contradiction in history, manifests its economic and political purposes. In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje interprets the historical context of the text. The text and social historical process form an intertextuality space, presenting the contradictions between the history and society of Sri Lanka, and reproducing the brutal and bloody historical reality.