Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Daniel Findlay Bedggood (University of Canterbury)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.5: South Asian Diasporic Literature and Culture, 1800-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Muneeza Shamsie (Independent Scholar - Asia), Niaz Zaman (Independent University Bangladesh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1987

Places

Canada (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Metafiction
Novel

Resources

Michael Ondaatje’s second epigraph to In the Skin of a Lion is a quotation from John Berger’s G. Berger writes that “never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one” (iv). Reflecting this, Ondaatje’s Booker Prize nominated novel serves as a forum for the “real” histories of workers and migrants largely ignored in the official constructions of Canada’s twentieth-century historical conception of “nationhood”, using a mix of techniques and voices to present different versions of the past. In this endeavour real documents are “quoted” and real, but marginalised, histories “voiced”. However, even these “real” sources, photographs and documents, are “quoted” in …

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3470 words

Citation: Bedggood, Daniel Findlay. "In the Skin of a Lion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 November 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4490, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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