The Tennessee Williams Annual Review
Recent Publications
Clericuzio, Alessandro. Tennessee Williams and Italy: A Transcultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Traces the establishment of Williams’s reputation with the intelligent-sia, theater practitioners, and audiences in Italy and describes the collaboration between Williams and the director Luchino Visconti, who defied decades of Italian censorship and control exerted on Williams’s work.
Hooper, Michael S. D. Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire over Protest. Cambridge UP, 2011 (paperback ed., 2015).
Challenges the trend of positioning Williams as a politically engaged social writer, arguing instead that his politics privilege the private over the public sphere and therefore champion the individual and the primacy of desire, rather than the community.
Ibell, Paul. Tennessee Williams. Reaktion Books, 2016.
An introduction to Williams’s life and work from Reaktion’s Critical Lives series.
Kaplan, David. Tenn Years: Tennessee Williams on Stage. Hansen Publishing Group, 2015.
A collection of essays on the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival from 2006 to 2015, written by a cofounder and curator of the festival.
Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. W. W. Norton, 2014 (paperback ed., 2015).
An acclaimed biography that presents a portrait of Williams through accounts of his family life and formative influences, his public persona, and the backstage drama surrounding his career.
O’Connor, Jacqueline. Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016.
Examines the intersections between Williams’s literature and the laws in force when his work was written, particularly those laws related to sexuality and identity.
Saddik, Annette J. Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer. Cambridge UP, 2015 (paperback ed., 2016).
Examines Williams’s plays, especially those of his post-1961 period, in the context of what the author terms a “theatre of excess,” which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter; analyzes recent productions that successfully captured his late aesthetic.
Williams, Tennessee. Moise and the World of Reason. New Directions, 2016.
Paperback reissue of the 1975 novel.
———. Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws and Other One-Act Plays. Edited by Thomas Keith, New Directions, 2016.
Trade edition of five previously unpublished one-acts, along with reissues of five late one-acts.