The Leonard Woolf Symposium

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 to 1911). 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