Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams
Desire over Protest

Is Tennessee Williams a social writer at heart? Hooper questions this view, presenting a new interpretation of the dramatist.

Michael S. D. Hooper (Author)

9781107015364, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 April 2012

260 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.4 x 16 x 1.7 cm, 0.55 kg

"This book forced this reviewer to rethink his vision of Tennessee Williams: Hooper gives scholars much to ponder about desire, sexuality, and political agency in Williams's plays.

Michael S. D. Hooper reverses the recent trend of regarding Tennessee Williams as fundamentally a social writer following the discovery, publication and/or performance of plays from both ends of his career - the 'proletarian' apprentice years of Candles to the Sun and Not About Nightingales and the once overlooked final period of, amongst many other plays, The Red Devil Battery Sign. Hooper contends that recent criticism has exaggerated the political engagement and egalitarian credentials of a writer whose characters and situations revert to a reactionary politics of the individual dominated by the negotiation of sexual power. Directly, or more often indirectly, Williams' writing expresses social disaffection before glamorising the outcast and shelving thoughts of political change. Through detailed analysis of canonical texts the book sheds new light on Williams' work, as well as on the cultural and social life of mid-twentieth-century America.

Introduction
1. Geiger-counters of rebellion
2. There will be pity for the wild
3. Desiring others
4. Emotional roots
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Theatre studies [AN]