Of greasy notebooks and dirty newspapers
Reading the illegible in The Village in the Jungle
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9003386 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 59-73 |
| Publication date | 2014-11-06 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989414556689 |
| OpenAlex | W2084295728 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 16 |
This essay examines the proliferation of colonial bureaucratic documents in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). With these ranging from account-books to gun permits and legal notices, the essay argues that documents play a fundamental yet mundane role in the lives of the novel’s characters. In the varied responses to these documents, from the confusion of the illiterate peasants to the sly manipulations of the village headman, it is their materiality that is highlighted, revealing them to be objects that are modified, circulated, handled and left unread. The essay goes on to argue that the novel also presents us with examples of documents and colonial spaces that simply cannot be read, thus exposing the limits of any colonial bureaucracy’s efficiency
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Bureaucracy · Colonialism · Jungle · Materiality (auditing · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Document Raj
Provincializing Europe
Anthropology in the margins of the state
Documents and Bureaucracy
Practical Reason
Reassembling the Social
Historic Acts? Santal Rebellion and the Temporality of Practice
Leonard Woolf and the book in the jungle
Leonard and Virginia Woolf
Along the Archival Grain
Government of Paper
Seeing Like a State
| Citations per year | 0.58 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |