Tennessee Williams' Plays

This book identifies a recurrent structural pattern in Tennessee Williams' plays that lends organic integrity to their evocations of memory, myth, and symbol. Judith J. Thompson examines the evolution of a pattern of mythic recollection and existential reenactment in seventeen Williams plays-from its most successful realization in The Glass Menagerie through The Night of the Iguana to its parody in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur-and explores the significance of the pattern to Williams' larger-than-life-size characters, his nostalgic ambience, and his tragicomic vision. By reference to Jungian psychology, existentialist philosophy, and Northrop Frye's schema of literary archetypes, this critical study demonstrates how Williams' drama imparts « mythic significance to modern secular experience. « 'Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol' is a moving book, the most sophisticated treatment yet of intertextuality in Williams' work. Those who appreciate the playwright with a love for literature more than welcome the book's long-delayed-but always expected-re-issue. With rare intellectual rigor and lucidity, Judith J. Thompson explores seventeen Williams plays and presents a compelling case for their structural continuities as well as thematic complexities. Her close readings are always breathtaking and her careful attention to mythology and symbolism is exemplary. The book is destined to be an essential chapter in the critical history of Tennessee Williams. (Tomoyuki Zettsu, Lecturer in English at Tokyo Gakugei University, Tokyo, Japan; author of 'Broken Boundaries: Tennessee Williams and a Poetics of Androgyny')