ABSTRACT

Tennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world, and are staples of the standard American repertory. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as America's leading gay playwright from the repressive postwar period, through Stonewall, to the growth of gay liberation, he represents an important and controversial figure for queer theorists. Gross and his contributors have included all of his plays, a chronology, introduction and bibliography.

chapter |3 pages

Introduction

chapter |8 pages

We All Have to Paint Our Nudes

The Iconography of Sexual Longing in Spring Storm

chapter |19 pages

“Stop! I'm a Family Man! I've Got a Daughter! A Little—Girrrrl!”

Prefiguring the Patriarch in Not About Nightingales

chapter |18 pages

“That Quiet Little Play”

Bourgeois Tragedy, Female Impersonation, and a Portrait of the Artist in The Glass Menagerie

chapter |12 pages

Two Transient Plays

A Streetcar Named Desire and Camino Real

chapter |18 pages

“Le Jeu Suprême”

Some Mallarmean Echoes in Tennessee Williams's Out Cry

chapter |14 pages

Memories and Muses

Vieux Carré and Something Cloudy, Something Clear

chapter |20 pages

Collapsing Resurrection Mythologies

Theatricalist Discourses of Fire and Ash in Clothes for a Summer Hotel

chapter |20 pages

“Nothing Unspoken”

The Notebook of Trigorin and The Seagull