The Tennessee Williams Annual Review
Editor’s Note
R. Barton Palmer
The 2018 issue of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review reflects the journal’s commitment to publishing cutting-edge research of interest both to Williams’s wide audience of admirers and to scholars engaged in placing this most important body of work in its intellectual and literary contexts. Readers will find in this year’s numbers a detailed exploration of Williams’s complex, nuanced, even paradoxical engagement with Christian traditions; new information about his work’s connections with D. H. Lawrence, Noël Coward, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and fresh insight into The Glass Menagerie—its Hollywood past and its international present.
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Since its founding more than a decade and a half ago by Robert Bray, the Review has focused on life-and-works approaches to the study of authorship, and while the editors are excited to be expanding the journal’s scope to take advantage of developments in cultural, adaptation, and film studies and other productive lenses, we remain committed to the value of traditional modes of scholarship that explore the intersections of “biography” broadly considered, aesthetics, literary history, and criticism. Thanks to Bray’s early and sustained investment in making available texts otherwise accessible only to those consulting Williams’s archived papers, the Review has regularly contributed to what we might call the documenting of his career.
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Readers should note that the concept of “Williams” that now guides our editorial decisions is much broader than it was a decade ago. This year’s issue gives space to scholarship devoted to the performance and production history of Williams’s drama, challenging the notion that his importance as a writer is narrowly American and, in line with trends in theater studies, tapping into what there is to learn from productions that are complexly transtextual (that is, adaptations), transnational, or both.
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The Review continues to solicit and publish work that explores the intersection of performance, stardom, and life-and-works approaches (last year’s issue, for example, included an essay approaching the actor Anna Magnani as a collaborator with Williams). We intend also to continue publishing reviews of current academic writing on Williams and reviews of recent, significant productions of his work, including, as this year, plays that are interesting homages to his career.
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Under Bray’s wise and energetic editorship, the journal early on established an important place for itself in twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama studies. As we move toward an expanded understanding of what constitutes work on Williams, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the indebtedness of the journal to its founding editor, who remains vitally involved in its continuing success.
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R. Barton Palmer
