Tennessee Williams in Sweden and France, 1945–1965: Cultural Translations, Sexual Anxieties and Racial Fantasies. By Dirk Gindt. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. xiii + 257 + 30 illus. £67.50/$91.80 Hb; £26.09/$35.96 Pb.

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-370
Author(s):  
Xavier Lemoine
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Cultural Translations

Angels Battle in Boston

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan R. Ellenberger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Bette Davis ◽  
First Time

Hopkins goes to New York for rehearsals in Battle with Angels, a play by first-time playwright Tennessee Williams. The play, however, is a failure, and the experience erodes Hopkins’s self-confidence, professionally and personally. She is offered several films before finally accepting the lead in A Gentleman after Dark. Hopkins accepts a role opposite Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance, a part that will bring Davis no end of problems.

The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002; pp. 240 + illus. $32.95 paper.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-126
Author(s):  
Anne Fleche
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
The Past ◽  
Awkward Position ◽  
Early Success ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Protection ◽  
Death Of The Author

The Undiscovered Country is a collection of essays mostly by and for the Tennessee Williams specialist—who else could write with such confidence that Williams's “instinct for finding the humor in his most intimate pain may have sprung from the natural inclinations for self-protection and self-deprecation, long known as personality traits of the playwright” (212) ? Williams's “later plays” (of the sixties and seventies) have been “undiscovered” precisely because the Williams specialist has tended to treat them with well-meaning sympathy, even defensiveness, rather than critical rigor. Each of the fifteen essays here opens with a gloomy recitation of one later play's production history and its miserable reviews, before moving on to describe the work as unfairly denigrated, and to defend Williams as the victim of his early success. Because Williams continues to experiment technically throughout his career, the writers in The Undiscovered Country are in an awkward position. If they want to say that the later plays are new, better, or even different, they have to look to the past—the very history that “traps” him. The need to view the Author as the “past” or source of the works is, as Roland Barthes saw, a modern invention that really seeks to glorify the critic. Barthes celebrated the “Death of the Author” not as an escape from critical responsibility but as a way to ensure it. What would it take to clear away the history of neglect and well-meaning phrases and to read Williams's plays differently?

scholarly journals An Oracle of Ashes: The Burial of James Purdy

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D151-LW&D176
Author(s):  
Maria Cecilia Holt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Present Writer ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
American Writer ◽  
International Borders

James Purdy (b. 1914), an American writer known for his grim humour and embrace of the outlandish and estranged, died in 2009, shortly after uttering his final wish: that after cremation his ashes should be buried near to Dame Edith Sitwell, one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of his works. This essay chronicles the journey of Purdy’s ashes from New York, USA, to Northamptonshire, UK, where they were laid to rest ten years after his death, and it explains how the present writer came to know Purdy not only through his novels, plays and poems, but also through working with Purdy’s literary executor, John Uecker, who also served as an assistant to Tennessee Williams. Necessarily autobiographical in certain passages, this essay tells of the discovery of grief in the process of planning the burial, of the power that can inhere in the materiality of cremated remains, and of the legal and logistical complexities of plotting interment across international borders.

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