Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913): A Day Symposium

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.