The Village in the Jungle [Paperback]

Leonard Woolf (Author), Nick Smith (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1590482549 | ISBN-13: 978-1590482544

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.

Editorial Reviews

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" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: The Long Riders' Guild Press (June 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590482549
• ISBN-13: 978-1590482544
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,177,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Village in the Jungle, November 23, 1999

By 

Alan Chi Kit Kwan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Village in the Jungle (20th Century Classics) (Paperback)

The Village in the Jungle, a fictional novel by Leonard Woolf, associates a series of catastrophic stories with one another. The predominant figures are Silindu (a hunter) and his two daughters Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. This story itself is based upon several different significant themes, including fate, love and tragedy. Personally, I found the book an absolute delight to read, being both suspenseful and interesting. Although the book cover jacket will most likely lack appeal to many people, this is most definitely a situation where one should not "judge a book by its cover". The title, The Village in the Jungle is nothing short of appropriate to the theme and plot of the novel. The plot, in a nutshell, is about a man named Silindu, who lives in the jungle and resists fate at every turn. He is an excellent hunter with cunning eyes, hunched-up shoulders and a small dark face all pinched. His ability of traveling around the jungle exceeds those of the animals. The incredible descriptions Woolf utilizes in the story allows the reader to clearly picture Silindu and his quest. The climax of the story is about Silindu's journey, having caught an "eccentric" disease. He didn't allow his daughter Hinnihami to marry a man from Vederala in the first place. Thus it was said that the disease he has is actually an evil spell. No matter how much effort he tries to cure himself it won't happen unless he willingly lets his daughter marry the man. The plot itself is really exciting throughout the entire book, with a few parts that are fairly slower in pace. "Leafless trees, hot humid air, rigid branches, and spider leg stems" is a portion of Leonard's description of the Jungle. All of his descriptions are perfectly arranged throughout the story, in which it makes the readers fall into the fabricated jungle described in his plot. "The air is heavy with the heat beating up from the earth. There is a fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the scattered leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, and peering beasts." (Pg 6, Woolf) This is one of the best lines taken out of the novel, because it gives the reader a full picture of the setting in the story. I highly recommend this novel to anyone looking for a hero's novel, although copies are exceedingly rare to locate as there were initially only a limited amount of copies printed. Through this story we can evidently see Silindu's courage in facing problems in unfavorable circumstances. I personally believe he is a true hero, because he really did have the spirit in surviving and staying alive no matter what happened. Overall, this novel is definitely an extraordinary thrilling book for anyone, providing hours of entertainment for people of all ages.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unedited scan, August 29, 2010

By 

Mark Sheehan - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

When the description says the book "may" include numerous typos, what it does not reveal is that the book DOES include at least twice, and often three times, on each full page of text a line break, the TITLE OF THE BOOK in capital letters, and the page number from the edition at the UC-Berkeley library from which it was scanned. I found these insertions so distracting that I immediately returned the book to Amazon and ordered a used copy of the out-of-print Oxford University Press edition from a different bookseller. I am deeply disappointed in Amazon for including such flawed produts among its offering.

1.0 out of 5 stars fraudulent copy of VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE, June 21, 2011

By 

obey - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

I have bought from amazon a copy of leonard Woolf VILLAGE IN THE JUNGLE. It was meant as a present to a friend but it turns out to be a scanned copy with little connection with the original. The return menu also does not seem to work. I am seriously concerned about this kind of reproduction that amounts to fraud.
Professor Gananath Obeyesekere
Princeton University
Home: 61 West 62nd street, #22A, NY, NY 10023