MFS Modern Fiction Studies

This essay traces how discourses of Jewishness circulating in the imperial metropole during the early twentieth century are translated into colonial settings in Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle, a translation visible in Woolf’s representations of colonial sexual alterity and in his critique of colonial power. The intersections of semitic and colonial discourses in Woolf’s novel bring together structures of domestic discrimination and foreign domination; the text thus offers us a transnational framework of interpretation that highlights the necessity of reading histories of oppression in tandem rather than in isolation.