‘The shifting reception of Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913)

TY - JOUR

T1 - ‘The shifting reception of Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913)

AU - Ranasinha, Ruvani

PY - 2015/3

Y1 - 2015/3

N2 - This article seeks to explore the reception of Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) in Sri Lanka. It examines the contrasting responses between those Sri Lankan critics who read the novel as anti-imperialist, and a younger generation who argue that the text manifests a wholly imperialist attitude and ideology and that its troping of colonial Ceylon and its inhabitants as savage, primitive, and Other replicates the discursive project of imperialism. This discussion asks to what extent are the differing responses to The Village in the Jungle explicable in terms of differing “horizons of expectations” and suggests how and why these have changed over the last few decades. It demonstrates how these responses problematize the nature of readerships, as well as the tension between aesthetics and politics in the literary text.

AB - This article seeks to explore the reception of Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) in Sri Lanka. It examines the contrasting responses between those Sri Lankan critics who read the novel as anti-imperialist, and a younger generation who argue that the text manifests a wholly imperialist attitude and ideology and that its troping of colonial Ceylon and its inhabitants as savage, primitive, and Other replicates the discursive project of imperialism. This discussion asks to what extent are the differing responses to The Village in the Jungle explicable in terms of differing “horizons of expectations” and suggests how and why these have changed over the last few decades. It demonstrates how these responses problematize the nature of readerships, as well as the tension between aesthetics and politics in the literary text.

U2 - 10.1177/0021989414557166

DO - 10.1177/0021989414557166

M3 - Article

SN - 0021-9894

VL - 50

SP - 33

EP - 45

JO - JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE

JF - JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE

IS - 1

ER -