‘The Final Frontier’: Exploring Language and Consciousness in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life

This paper studies David Malouf’s critique of Western strategies of settlement and exploration in his novel, An Imaginary Life. Malouf unveils the Western epistemic dichotomy between nature and culture and its role in perpetuating the figures of dislocation and alienation underlying settler colonial exile. Ovid’s story of exile gradually becomes the agent of a re-writing that is at once profoundly poetic and deeply immersed in the politics of imperial subjugation