Modern Drama

Gertrude Stein’s play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and Virginia Woolf’s play-novel Between the Acts use an array of genres to connect with literary history without uncritically reproducing past forms and ideologies in the present. Writing on the brink of World War II, both authors respond to the histories and literary forms they associate with patriarchal violence, through self-renewing dramas that allow for the possibility of change. Through intertextual analysis, not moored to demonstrable mutual influence, but alert to common influences, I posit the pasts Woolf and Stein rejected and rebuilt as the strongest links between them.