Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries compiles eight transcribed panels that were featured at The Tennessee Williams Scholars’ Conference, an annual event held each March in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. This study, the first of its kind, explores issues involving Williams’s drama, fiction, poetry, and films in a discursive format designed to probe and debate the legacy of America’s famous playwright. Virtually all aspects of Williams’s long career are covered in this volume, including the early and late plays, his unpublished work, his use of the grotesque, and his relationships with three of his contemporaries: Carson McCullers, Lillian Hellman, and William Inge. In addition, Williams scholars who teach his work discuss the most effective strategies for bringing his material into the classroom. The unique design of this volume offers a broad understanding of his material for students previously unacquainted with Tennessee Williams as well as fresh perspectives from recognized experts in the field that will satisfy those who are already familiar with his life and work.

Although he spent the bulk of his life in Oxford, Mississippi-far removed from the intellectual centers of modernism and the writers who created it—William Faulkner (1897–1962) proved to be one of the American novelists who most comprehensively grasped modernism. In his fiction he tested its tenets in the most startling and insightful ways. What, then, did such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Walker Evans think of his work? How did his times affect and accept what he wrote? Faulkner and His Contemporaries explores the relationship between the Nobel laureate, ensconced in his “postage stamp of native soil,” and the world of letters within which he created his masterpieces. In this anthology, essays focus on such topics as how Faulkner's literary antecedents (in particular, Willa Cather and Joseph Conrad) influenced his writing, his literary/aesthetic feud with rival Ernest Hemingway, and the common themes he shares with fellow southerners Welty and Evans. Several essays examine the environment in which Faulkner worked. Deborah Clarke concentrates on the rise of the automobile industry. W. Kenneth Holditch shows how the city of New Orleans acted as a major force in Faulkner's fiction, and Grace Elizabeth Hale examines how the civil rights era of Faulkner's later career compelled him to deal with his ideas about race and rebellion in new ways.

This book explores Williams' late plays in terms of a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter.

Provides a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder's Our Town to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.

The World of Tennessee Williams offers a survey of the life and career of one of America¿s greatest dramatists from his birth in 1911 to his death in 1983. Richard Leavitt was in a unique position to create such a volume since he was a friend of Tennessee¿s and followed his career closeup. Kenneth Holditch, who has undertaken the task of completing the text was a friend of Leavitt¿s and knew Tennessee Williams. It has been his desire to carry to fruition the original plan Dick Leavitt conceived in the 1970s and augmented in 1983 when Williams died.

This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of British and American films adapted from modern British plays. Offering insights into the mutually profitable relationship between the newest performance medium and the most ancient. With each chapter written by an expert in the field, Modern British Drama on Screen focuses on key playwrights of the period including George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and John Osborne and the most significant British drama of the past century from Pygmalion to The Madness of George III. Most chapters are devoted to single plays and the transformations they underwent in the move from stage to screen. Ideally suited for classroom use, this book offers a semester's worth of introductory material for the study of theater and film in modern Britain, widely acknowledged as a world center of dramatic productions for both the stage and screen.

This book reveals for the first time the import of a huge network of connections between Tennessee Williams and the country closest to his heart, Italy. America's most thought-provoking playwright loved Italy more than any other country outside the US and was deeply influenced by its culture for most of his life. Anna Magnani's film roles in the 1940s, Italian Neo-realist cinema, the theatre of Eduardo De Filippo, as well as the actual experience of Italian life and culture during his long stays in the country were some of the elements shaping his literary output. Through his lover Frank Merlo, he also had first-hand knowledge of Italian-American life in Brooklyn. Tracing the establishment of his reputation with the Italian intelligentsia, as well as with theatre practitioners and with generations of audiences, the book also tells the story of a momentous collaboration in the theatre, between Williams and Luchino Visconti, who had to defy the unceasing control Italian censorship exerted on Williams for decades.

As a child growing up in the Deep South, Tom “Tennessee” Williams escaped from his tumultuous home life by retreating into his imagination. His love for made-up stories would eventually translate into a propensity for writing drama and poetry. This compelling text places the playwright’s work in the context of his life and times, allowing readers to gain a greater understanding of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Featuring quotes, excerpts, and in-depth critical analysis of his most famous plays as well as his lesser-known works, the text provides an in-depth look at this hard-working, prolific playwright considered by many to be among the greatest of his time.

Focusing on key texts, leading scholars explore how Hollywood has given an enduring life to the classics of Broadway theater.

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.