Sri Lankan Traditions and the Imperial Imagination: Leonard Woolf's 'The Village in the Jungle'

Victoria Glendinning, biographer of Leonard Woolf, offers her insights from extensive archival research into the life of Woolf in Ceylon and Britain. She explores Woolf's relationship to the metropolitan centre through his movement out to the colonial periphery and back again, exploring all that it held for him, including the Bloomsbury group and, of course, Virginia herself.

This Roundtable Discussion offers several ways into the life and work of Leonard Woolf from the perspectives of several academics. Hermione Lee and Anna Snaith build on the intersections of Leonard's work with Virginia Woolf's novels, while Elleke Boehmer and Nisha Manocha trace the Conradian elements of his writing. David Trotter explains why he understands Woolf's novel to be a 'primitivist' text, while Susheila Nasta brings Woolf's interactions with E.M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand and others to the fore.

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. She demonstrates the way in which the novel is heavily inflected with these traditions and employs them in interesting and significant ways.