This essay argues that the incipient female modernism of Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, was catalyzed by her productive engagement with Joseph Conrad and Leonard Woolf, whose combined influence helped Virginia define her difference from Jane Austen. Conrad's importance to Woolf has not been understood in the context of her marriage to Leonard, a colonial administrator who gave up his post in Ceylon to finish his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, and to set up house in London with Virginia, who was struggling to finish The Voyage Out. Leonard's novel has not been studied as an influence on Virginia's, but for Virginia the potential emotional cost of choosing heterosexual domesticity was brought home not only by her decision to marry Leonard but by the discursive pressure of Leonard's text, itself echoing Conrad's, on the embattled subjectivity of her own. Closely attentive to the ways in which gender, sexuality, and literary history mediate between texts, the essay offers a new perspective on the tortuous composition of The Voyage Out, which Woolf may have rewritten as many as twelve times, and articulates a version of female modernism grounded not in the (feminine) subversion of (male) structures but in the messy tangle of interpersonal and intertextual relations that informs literary production.

Antonin Artaud complained bitterly on numerous occasions of the public's "resistance" to his dramaturgical theories. This essay traces the history of the reception of Artaud's cultural interventions in the 1930s by members of the French political far Right and aims to explain the logic by which Artaud was being resisted. In so doing, it argues that despite Artaud's uncompromising eschewal of political involvement, he was nevertheless deeply engaged in a "politics of style" emanating from the Action Française, a reactionary, nationalist movement under the tutelage of Charles Maurras that refused to him entry into the canon of "French" letters. Diverging esthetic commitments, involving varying notions of what is constitutive of the poetic and the nonpoetic, translated in Maurrassian ideology into opposing political commitments. Spreen's essay demonstrates how Artaud's promotion of a "poetry of the senses" threatened nationalist esthetic and political boundaries as nationalists identified Artaudian theater with the plagues of political and esthetic anarchy imported into France from abroad.