In the Country House: National Archive, War Ruins, and Modernist Ethnography in Virginia Woolf and Xiao Hong

This piece compares the thematic engagement with “the country house” in two wartime novels—Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) and Xiao Hong’s Hulan He Zhuan 《呼兰河传》 (Tales of Hulan River, 1940)—by placing them within the late-1930s transnational discourse of national historiography, which inherits imperial technologies for mapping ethnic and cultural identities. This article argues that as ethnic nationalism crystallized in so-called imperial “interiors” like Britain as well as “frontlines” like China, both writers disputed the fantasy of a unified cultural archive as the source of national identification. In performing a failure to summon a “we” against war catastrophe, their fictional ethnographies disrupt the territorializing logic that frames the country house as a stable repository of the collective past. Their respective engagements with prehistory and nontime reveal how the smooth procession of history relies on violently expelling the nation’s various, particularly gendered, outsiders. Reopening the national archive to its expelled others, Woolf’s and Xiao Hong’s renewed archival practices create not a fixed past but an inhabitable, pluralized future that allows multiple pasts to be recognized, gesturing toward modes of transnational identification across a “combined and uneven” order of global imperialism.