Mark Wollaeger

The Woolfs in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and the Emergence of Female Modernism in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle, and Heart of Darkness

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf advises women writers to “think back” through their mothers, but the tortuous composition of The Voyage Out (1915) reveals that, to begin her own career, Woolf first had to think past her husband to get to Joseph Conrad.1 The Voyage Out assumed its final form only after Woolf had returned from her honeymoon to read Leonard Woolf’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), in manuscript. Both The Village in the Jungle and The Voyage Out are indebted to Conrad, particularly to Heart of Darkness (1899–1900), and this common debt magnified the influence of Leonard’s book on Woolf’s. While many have written about the influence of Heart of Darkness on The Voyage Out, Conrad’s importance to Woolf has not been understood in the context of her marriage to Leonard, a colonial administrator who renounced his outpost of progress in Ceylon to set up house in London with her while finishing The Village in the Jungle.2

Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale

The paper explores some longstanding definitional problems in literary modernism with specific reference to studying modernism on a global scale: What counts as modernism once we start to look for signs of it across the globe? The author examines the question in the context of his recent editorial project, Global Modernisms, which draws together multiple international and disciplinary perspectives in order to create a discursive space in which a wide range of foreign language productions can be brought into productive dialogue. Raising the question of whether a distinction between “modern” and “modernist” can be sustained, he suggests the need for continuing efforts of recursive definition as the field expands in order to maintain a viable object of study.