The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams

by Edited by Matthew C. Roudané

• ISBN13: 9780521495332
• ISBN10: 0521495334
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a collection of thirteen original essays from a team of leading scholars in the field. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors cover a healthy sampling of Williams's works, from the early apprenticeship years in the 1930s through to his last play before his death in 1983, Something Cloudy, Something Clear. In addition to essays on such major plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Companion also features a chapter on selected key productions as well as a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi	(1)
Notes on contributors	xii	(4)
Chronology	xvi
Introduction	1	(10)
MATTHEW C.ROUDANE
1 Early Williams: the making of a playwright	11	(18)
ALLEAN HALE
2 Entering The Glass Menagerie	29	(16)
C.W.E.BIGSBY
3 A streetcar running fifty years	45	(22)
FELICIA HARDISON LONDRE
4 Camino Real: Williams's allegory about the fifties	67	(28)
JAN BALAKIAN
5 Writing in "A place of stone": Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	95	(19)
ALBERT J. DEVLIN
6 Before the Fall -- and after: Summer and Smoke and The Night of the Iguana	114	(14)
THOMAS P. ADLER
7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth	128	(19)
JOHN M. CLUM
8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories	147	(20)
NANCY M. TISCHLER
9 Creative rewriting: European and American influences on the dramas of Tennessee Williams	167	(22)
GILBERT DEBUSSCHER
10 Seeking direction	189	(15)
BRENDA MURPHY
11 Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the evolution of the adult film	204	(28)
R. BARTON PALMER
12 Tennessee Williams: the last two decades	232	(12)
RUBY COHN
13 Words on Williams: a bibliographic essay	244	(11)
JACQUELINE O'CONNOR
14 The Strangest Kind of Romance: Tennessee Williams and his Broadway critics	255	(10)
JACQUELINE O'CONNOR
Selected bibliography	265	(7)
Index	272