Relevant Links
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.
| # | Episode Title | Description | People | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Creative Commons | '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. | Victoria Glendinning | 18 Jun 2013 |
| 2 | Creative Commons | '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, Anna Snaith, Elleke Boehmer, Nisha Manocha | 18 Jun 2013 |
| 1 | Creative Commons | 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. | Chandani Lokuge | 18 Jun 2013 |