Venue: Haldane Room, Wolfson College, Oxford. OX2 6UD.
The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College is delighted to host this workshop marking the centenary of the publication of Leonard Woolf’s path-breaking first novel, set in then Ceylon, 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 will consider Woolf’s radical colonialist legacy, and will explore 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. We will be interested, too, in the 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 consider some of the intersections between their works and their lives.
Please address any queries about the symposium to Dominic Davies by emailing leonard.woolf.symposium@gmail.com
Workshop convenor: Professor Elleke Boehmer
Workshop facilitator: Dominic Davies
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME
9:30-10:00: Registration
10-11:15: Opening Keynote
Chandani Lokuge (Monash University, Australia)
‘Indigenous Tradition and the Western Imagination:
Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle’
11:15-11:30: Coffee/Tea
11:30-12:45: The Village in the Jungle Roundtable
A discussion of key passages from Leonard (and possibly Virginia) Woolf, led by
Elleke Boehmer (Oxford), Hermione Lee (Oxford), Susheila Nasta (OU), Nisha Manocha (Wolfson)
Anna Snaith (KCL), David Trotter (Cambridge) tbc
The readings will be circulated to all participants in advance.
12:45-1:45: Lunch
1:45-3:15: Panel discussion: ‘Perceptions of the Jungle’
Chair: Nicola Robinson (York)
Ruvani Ranasinha (KCL)
‘The Village in the Jungle then and now/here and there’
Susan Jones (St Hilda’s, Oxford)
‘Visual and kinaesthetic presentations of the jungle’
Dominic Davies (St Anne’s, Oxford)
‘Structural Violence and Violence against Structures in The Village in the Jungle’
Priyasha Mukhopadyay (Wolfson College, Oxford)
‘”Their greasy little notebooks”: Debt and the Headman in The Village in the Jungle’
3:15-3:30: Tea/Coffee
3:30-4:45: Closing Plenary
Victoria Glendinning (biographer of Leonard Woolf)
Introduced by Hermione Lee (biographer of Virginia Woolf)
‘The Village in the Jungle as colonial memoir: Woolf writing home’
5:00-6:00: Writers reading
Roshi Fernando
Roma Tearne
OCLW offers sincere thanks to the Wolfson South Asia cluster for its support of the writers’ panel.
In order to register please fill out the form below and return to: leonard.woolf.symposium@gmail.com.
Symposium: Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle
Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
Saturday 9th March 2013
This book facinated me when I was a schoolboy. Later it was my English text book for GCE-O level. Had a fabulus English teacher late Mr.Oswin Wright who also loved this book and the Wolfs – Leonard and Virginia. Very happy that this symposium is taking place.
Very happy to see anything that has a focus..on our beautifull island.
hope that you have a decent turn out and see someof you there!!!
O and despite our many problems happy independence day to all our people home and abroad………Jayawewa and vanakam