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5 books match the query 'Tennessee Williams'

cover of Blue Roses: Tennessee Williams, Memory, and the Queer Archive

Blue Roses

Tennessee Williams, Memory, and the Queer Archive

Daniel Ciba

University of Iowa Press, 2026

Blue Roses documents a queer response to one of the most popular American playwrights of the twentieth century: Tennessee Williams. Referencing Williams’s symbolic nickname for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Daniel Ciba arranges archival memories that provoke, resist, and reimagine Williams’s contribution to LGBTQ+ culture. Ciba theorizes new archival methodologies that blend memory studies, queer theory, and theatre historiography. Each blue rose is an untold story of queer history that corresponds to a different period of Williams’s life, from World War II to the Lavender Scare and the Stonewall uprising.
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cover of Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams

Blue Song

St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams

Henry I. Schvey

University of Missouri Press, 2022

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri.

The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.
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cover of Dramatizing Dementia: Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams

Dramatizing Dementia

Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams

Jacqueline O'Connor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Jacqueline O’Connor examines how Tennessee Williams portrayed society’s treatment of the mentally ill. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical sources.
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cover of Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams

Magical Muse

Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams

Edited by Ralph F. Voss

University of Alabama Press, 2002

In this unique and engaging collection, twelve essays celebrate the legacy of one of America's most important playwrights and investigate Williams's enduring effect on America's cultural, theatrical, and literary heritage.
 
Like Faulkner before him, Tennessee Williams gave universal appeal to southern characters and settings. His major plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie to A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana, continue to capture America's popular imagination, a significant legacy. Though he died in 1983, only recently have Williams's papers become available to the public, bringing to light a number of intriguing discoveries—letters, drafts, and several unpublished and unproduced plays. These recent developments make a reassessment of Williams's life and work both timely and needed.

The essays in this collection originated as presentations at the 27th annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at The University of Alabama in 1999. The book addresses a wide range of topics, among them the influence of popular culture on Williams's plays, and, in turn, his influence on popular culture; his relationship to Hollywood and his struggles with censorship, Hollywood standards, and the competing vision of directors such as Elia Kazan; his depictions of gender and sexuality; and issues raised by recently discovered plays.

Anyone interested in American literature and drama will find this collection of fresh, accessible essays a rewarding perspective on the life, work, and legacy of one of the bright stars of American theatre.
 

 

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cover of Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism

Mimetic Disillusion

Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism

Anne Fleche

University of Alabama Press, 1997

Reimagining American dramatic realism through the lenses of mimesis, theory, and theatrical innovation.

This volume focuses on two major writers of the 1930s and 1940s—Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams—one whose writing career was just ending and the other whose career was just beginning. In new readings of their major works from this period, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire, Fleche develops connections to the writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others, and discusses poststructuralism in the light of modern writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Walter Benjamin. Fleche also extends this discussion to the work of two contemporary playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy and Tony Kushner. The aim of Mimetic Disillusion is not to reject "mimetic" and "realistic" readings but to explore the rich complexities of these two ideas and the fruit of their ongoing relevance to U.S. theatre.
 

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