The Village in the Jungle - Softcover

Woolf, Leonard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590482549 ISBN 13: 9781590482544

Publisher: The Long Riders' Guild Press, 2007

Synopsis

‘All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama.’ In a literary career spanning more than 60 years the highly prolific man of letters Leonard Woolf published hardly any fiction. Of the little he did produce, by far the most important was The Village in the Jungle (1913), a debut novel set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) of such literary accomplishment that it should have propelled him on a career to match his great contemporaries D H Lawrence or Thomas Hardy. Instead Woolf chose to devote himself to publishing fiction by his more famous wife, Virginia, while running the famous Hogarth Press. Despite being virtually unknown The Village in the Jungle is an important classic, rare among English novels of the Edwardian era. While most take the viewpoint of the coloniser, Woolf tells his tale of native life in a colonial outpost from the point of view of the colonised. It is also a tale of superstition and murder set against a backdrop of the jungle that threatens to swallow everything up in its path. The Village in the Jungle is the work of a young writer of immense skill and maturity. His flawlessly lyrical and intense prose brings the jungle chillingly to life, while his innate understanding of the Sinhalese people garnered from seven years as a colonial administrator on the island gives the novel real authenticity. Widely regarded as one of the best books in English about Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle is regarded in Sri Lanka today as a national treasure. Despite the early success of The Village in the Jungle Woolf’s only other fiction about Ceylon is a slim volume of three short stories called Stories of the East (1921), also available from Classic Travel Books.

About this title

Review:

"It is a pleasure to read Leonard Woolf's novel The Village in the Jungle in this new edition compiled by Yasmine Gooneratne. First of all, it makes good reading because the author, who was at the beginning of his writing career when he published it for the first time with Edward Arnold in London in 1913, displayed a strong and experienced voice with a convincing and persuasive literary style. The story takes the reader behind the orderly facade of colonial Ceylon to the rural milieu in which clashes of emotions and cultures occur. Secondly, it reveals the conflicts which the imperial power of Britain inflicted on an indigenous people, and which determined the lives and fortunes of many an individual torn between tradition and innovation. Succeeding the works of Rudyard Kipling and preceding those of Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster, The Village in the Jungle occupies an important place in the history of English colonial literature... Yasmine Gooneratne presents a convincing scholarly edition of this classic of colonial literature. Being of Sri Lankan origin herself, she knows the setting of the plot from her own childhood experience; and as an experienced author of two postcolonial novels, A Change of Skies (1991) and The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), she possesses the necessary insights into the narratological and academic demands of such an enterprise. In her persuasive introduction she deploys all these skills, beginning by explaining to the reader the biographical background of Leonard Woolf, whose life was darkened by his wife's ill health while his life's work was overshadowed by her literary fame. She draws our attention to the novel's implied criticism of British imperial policy, and points out analogies with T.S. Eliot's famous poetical sequence The Waste Land (1922), which owes so much to Leonard Woolf's prophetic inspiration anticipating the destructive powers of the Great War. Her fresh evaluation of the symbolic strengths which underscore on a fictional level the gap of two narrative discourses, those of the colonial and postcolonial phases in recent British history, rightly locates Woolf's novel as an important text amidst Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. In doing so she picks up on research lines of Basil Mendis, Peter Elkin and Mervyn de Silva, who had previously analysed the novel along critical assumptions now dated, her scholarly acumen and credo prompting her to return to the novel's source, i.e., to the 264-page manuscript which reposes in the steel safe of the Librarian of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. She conducted this archival research to mark the passages which vary substantially and significantly from the printed editions of the book, thus enabling the reader to observe and participate in the creative process which the author underwent in writing his novel... It would have been difficult for a Western reader to follow the plot of this intriguing novel without the understanding of certain Sinhala words and a knowledge of some indigenous myths. Yasmine Gooneratne, with her academic expertise in oriental and Western culture, guarantees the necessary insights into the intricate and conflicting traditions which meet in this novel. A comprehensive bibliography invites further research on this seminal book. This careful edition of The Village in the Jungle will, one hopes, restore the novel's literary reputation and help to establish its proper profile in the field of literary studies." - Professor Rudiger Ahrens, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Wurzburg, Germany "The Village in the Jungle is a novel that should be far better known. One may hope that now, in this fully restored edition. it will find a readership moved by its carefully developed tragic narrative and challenged by its prescient political analysis. It is a fiction whose human drama is driven by the economic motor of imperial policy, its enforcement, its interests. self interests and murderous entanglements... One of the many benefits offered by this scrupulously annotated scholarly edition is that. by providing cancelled passages as well as other emendations and substitutions in the Notes, it enables us to watch the narrator in this act of disappearing. As one reads, one gradually enters a text that seems to be happening outside the narrator's earshot, beyond his power to influence or control. It becomes as a result a witness text by the voiceless. The village world, the jungle landscape are their own space, not symbols of the writer's metaphysical anxieties. The western presence is there, but only at the margins, in the brief appearances of the magistrate. Constructed directly out of Woolf's own experiences in that role, he is a reluctant but complicit imperial agent, what Woolf came to understand his own role to have been in the imperial system... In detail after detail, this remarkable novel's analysis of imperialism is grounded in the process of its repudiation." - (from the Foreword) Professor Judith Scherer Herz, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada "Professor Yasmine Gooneratne has edited Leonard Woolf's novel with the meticulous care it deserves, taking into consideration the entire range of critical interpretations the text has generated in the ninety years of its existence. The extensive notes at the end provide useful textual as well as cultural information, and a fascinating Appendix brings to the notice of the reader a film version of The Village in the Jungle made in Sri Lanka and a somewhat curious reading of the novel by a recent biographer of Virginia Woolf who holds Leonard Woolf responsible for his wife's suicide. Complete with a detailed Introduction and an exhaustive bibliography, this is likely to become the definitive edition of this twentieth century classic. The novel may be a minor classic as far as mainstream English literature is concerned, but in the context of Sri Lanka it occupies a prominent position, somewhat similar to the position of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India in India. The two novels, written within a few years of each other, are both attempts by unusually perceptive British writers to understand the countries ruled by Britain. Both have been widely read and discussed in the respective countries, and often prescribed in courses of study. Leonard Woolf's novel has an elemental quality about it. The paradigmatic story of a simple village community disintegrating under the multiple assaults of 'civilization', inclement nature and hostile fate has been told in diverse ways in several non-Western cultures later in the century (e.g., Chinua Achebe's Thing.s- Fall Apart or Gopinath Mohanty's Paraja) but this book is unique in having been written by an 'outsider' who had empathy with the village people as well as an ironic realization of the limitations of a colonial legal system (of which he himself was a part) in providing justice to them." - Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, University of Hyderabad, India"

About the Author:

Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne, D.Litt. (Macquarie), Ph.D. (Cambridge), BA Hons. (Ceylon), is a poet, novelist and author of studies of Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Ruth Jhabvala and Leonard Woolf. Professor Gooneratne has been awarded honours including the Marjorie Barnard Prize for Fiction, India's Raja Rao Award for her outstanding contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora, and the Order of Australia for her services to literature and education.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Long Riders' Guild Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1590482549
• ISBN 13: 9781590482544
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268