Leonard Woolf’s Stories from the East : postcolonial digital humanities and Bloomsbury’s pictorial-textual vision

Building upon the growing body of criticism about the interrelated concerns of colonialism and anti-Semitism in Leonard Woolf’s fiction, this essay draws on archival materials featured by the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), particularly those revolving around the publication history of Stories of the East (1921), to investigate how Woolf destabilized imperialist categories through his combined roles as writer and publisher – and thus also as self-marketer – within the Hogarth Press. These materials include the Hogarth Press advertisement card for Stories of the East and the woodcut image for the book’s inaugural edition cover, by and from the notebook of Dora Carrington; collectively, they are remarkably important for revealing nuanced cultural dialogues around race, ethnicity, and cultural belonging, which are topics central to Woolf’s fiction. Carrington’s woodcut illustrations, moreover, offer a glimpse into the nuances of her relationship with Bloomsbury. By recognizing the new visual modes enabled by MAPP’s data infrastructure, the essay then expands the digitally mediated dialectic between text and image at the Hogarth Press while offering the Press’s archived materials as a space for interrogating the organizing epistemologies of digital knowledge production in the twenty-first century.