3 episodes
Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle (1913): A Day Symposium Oxford University
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On 9 March 2013, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College host a workshop to mark the centenary of the publication of Leonard Woolf's path-breaking
first novel, set in then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, The Village in the Jungle. Woolf's novel (the first of only two) is a leading yet often overlooked modernist document and is increasingly recognized as an extraordinarily far-sighted colonial text, an oblique record of his years as a colonial officer in Ceylon (1904-11). It has also become a foundational novel in the Sri Lankan
literary canon. The workshop considered Woolf's radical colonialist legacy, exploring the relationship of The Village in the Jungle to his later oeuvre of economic theory and political commentary, as well as to the field of post/colonial and empire writing more broadly. There are many intertextual links running between the 1910s work of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and others of and related to the Bloomsbury group, and that of Leonard Woolf, and the workshop also considered some of the intersections between their works and their lives.
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'The Village in the Jungle' as colonial memoir: Woolf writing home
Victoria Glendinning, biographer of Leonard Woolf, offers her insights from extensive archival research into the life of Woolf in Ceylon and Britain. She explores Woolf's relationship to the metropolitan centre through his movement out to the colonial periphery and back again, exploring all that it held for him, including the Bloomsbury group and, of course, Virginia herself. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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'The Village in the Jungle' Roundtable Discussion
This Roundtable Discussion offers several ways into the life and work of Leonard Woolf from the perspectives of several academics. Hermione Lee and Anna Snaith build on the intersections of Leonard's work with Virginia Woolf's novels, while Elleke Boehmer and Nisha Manocha trace the Conradian elements of his writing. David Trotter explains why he understands Woolf's novel to be a 'primitivist' text, while Susheila Nasta brings Woolf's interactions with E.M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand and others to the fore. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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Sri Lankan Traditions and the Imperial Imagination: Leonard Woolf's 'The Village in the Jungle'
Novelist and academic, Chandani Lokuge, gives her keynote at the symposium. She brings Sri Lankan linguistic and cultural traditions to Woolf's The Village in the Jungle. She demonstrates the way in which the novel is heavily inflected with these traditions and employs them in interesting and significant ways. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/