Leila Haghshenas

This paper aims to investigate the influence of democratic thoughts on Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins (1914). Focusing on Nelly Wolf’s work on narrative democracy, I will examine the relationship between the novel as a democratic genre and the democratic ambitions of Woolf’s characters such as Harry Davis and Camilla Lawrence. As I will demonstrate, Woolf’s narrative approach is informed by popular misconceptions and judgments. I will also study what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’ through an analysis of the share of characters in what is common to the community.

This paper focuses on the representation of change and mutability in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and the creation of an aesthetics of mutability. It suggests that the novel’s unstable state emerges out of Woolf’s understanding of the East and its people and from his perspective on the question of the nature of humanity. Woolf seems to refuse the Conradian perception of the East as immutable and to propose instead a new and realistic vision of the orient and its people, that of a constantly moving and evolving East. The inherent instability of the jungle, it is argued here, extends to the village and its inhabitants and expresses itself through the blurring of boundaries between humans and animals, social classes and even genders. Multiple transformations and reversals in The Village in the Jungle point to the novel’s affinity for unstable states and mutable conditions.
Read the article here: http://09.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/angles/index.php?id=808

The Hotel, Leonard Woolf’s only play, was published in 1938. Despite his best efforts, Woolf never succeeded in having his play performed. Woolf’s work brings to the forefront such essential debates as the question of the individual’s responsibility in shaping collective destiny or the necessity of dialogue and collaboration in a highly complex and globalized world. This paper analyses Woolf’s choice of the hotel as both a meeting point and an echo chamber. This will be examined through the theories of ‘logic of place’ and ‘action-intuition’ developed by the Japanese philosopher Kitarô Nishida. The play’s connection with the political avant-garde theatre will also be explored through its link with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre of Action.

The present paper intends to bring to light the bare lives of the ignored and marginalised characters in Leonard Woolf’s short story ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’. In the story, Leonard Woolf creates and explores a singular self-effacing and self-dispossessing narrative approach that enables him to expose elements of his own life as a colonial agent along with those of the vulnerable and dispossessed subalterns. Further than defining the various forms of dispossession at work in Woolf’s short story, the paper means to show how norms of invisibility are shaped and developed in Woolf’s short story and how lives are exposed and recreated.

The present paper intends to explore Leonard Woolf’s concern with the ‘low orders’, and his humble position towards the other through a study of the aesthetics of humility in The Village in the Jungle. Indeed, what is striking about the novel is the constant effacement of the narrator in favour of different characters especially those deprived of the power of language in the colonial context, a narrative approach that points to his humility. Furthermore, Woolf’s faithful description of the miserable and ordinary quotidian of the Ceylonese villagers is indeed indicative of his orientation towards the other and helps establish a link between the poetics of the novel and that of the everyday.