Situating the Jungle-village in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913)

Bibliographic Data

ID19019101
AuthorsVihanga Perera (0000-0001-9988-9791, Open University of Sri Lanka, corresponding author)
Year2023
Issue32/1
Pages5-16
Publication date2023-10-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnglica. An International Journal of English Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0860-5734 • E-ISSN: 2957-0905
PublisherUniversity of Warsaw (PUBLISHER • PL)
DOI10.7311/0860-5734.32.1.01
OpenAlexW4387978472
LanguageEN
References cited9

This paper addresses a gap in literary research in the scholarship on Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle: a lack of demonstrated understanding on the part of major critics as to what constitutes a village-jungle in the early-20th-century Ceylonese context and, as a result, misunderstanding of the novel’s main characters and events. By drawing on comparative and indigenous sources by writers like R.L. Spittel and Mayaran- jan, the paper calls attention to narratives on forest-life as representing a sensibility that is experientially derived; this – in contrast to the claims of Woolf’s critics – brings on a sensibility that lies beyond simplistic claims to “orientalism” and endorsement of colonial views. The discussion centrally draws on the significance of comparative local sources in framing insights to forest life in Ceylon, as the absence of such comparisons hinders the understanding of a novel like The Village in the Jungle to the point of producing readings that prove incomplete and even misleading

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnology · Indigenous · Jungle · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sensibility · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Ecology

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