Undiscovered Country

The Editor: Philip C. Kolin, Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the founding co-editor of Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present and an authority on the plays of Tennessee Williams. He has four other books on Williams, including a cultural and theatre history of A Streetcar Named Desire, and more than fifteen books on Shakespeare, David Rabe, Edward Albee, and technical writing. Kolin is also the general editor for a Shakespeare criticism series.

«With this volume of 15 provocative essays on the later plays, Philip Kolin makes another major contribution to the study of Tennessee Williams’ work. It will provide a strong foundation on which to build a new understanding of the significance and quality of these undeservedly neglected plays. Employing an extraordinary range of knowledge to inform their analyses – from the theories of Artaud and Brecht to the aesthetics of N and Postmodernism to the disciplines of theology and philosophy – these distinguished scholars and critics have written readable and enlightening essays that will undoubtedly serve as an incentive to future study and criticism.» (Brenda Murphy, Professor of English, University of Connecticut)«Philip Kolin’s ‘The Undiscovered Country’ is an important and unique addition to Tennessee Williams scholarship. These fifteen essays invite readers to reconsider the value of the later works of Williams, and do so in fresh, original ways. This collection provides an engaging corrective to the neglect and discredit that have long haunted the last two decades of Williams’ career.» (Matthew Roudané, Professor of English and Chair, Georgia State University)«A well-equipped band of scholars track Tennessee Williams into ‘The Undiscovered Country’ of old age – when Williams wrote many of his largely unknown slapstick tragedies. These transgressive plays are wildly experimental, full of cartoon characters, painful pratfalls, garish ghosts, and idiosyncratic insights. Like their European contemporaries, these dramas mirror a confused and confusing world. We owe a debt of gratitude to these sturdy critics who help us understand and appreciate the late Tennessee Williams.» (Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita, The Pennsylvania State University)

• Contents: Philip C. Kolin: Introduction – Annette J. Saddik: «The Inexpressible Regret of All Her Regrets»: Tennessee Williams’s Later Plays as Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty – Michael Paller: The Day on Which a Woman Dies: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and Nō Theatre – Allean Hale: The Gnädiges Fräulein: Tennessee Williams’s Clown Show – Una Chaudhuri: «AWK!»: Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkwardness in Tennessee Williams’s The Gnädiges Fräulein – Gene D. Phillips, S.J.: Tennessee Williams’s Forgotten Film: The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots as a Screen Version of The Seven Descents of Myrtle – Terri Smith Ruckel: Ut Pictura Poesis, Ut Poesis Pictura: The Painterly Texture of Tennessee Williams’s In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel – Felicia Hardison Londré: The Two-Character Out Cry and Break Out – Philip C. Kolin: «having lost the ability to say: ‘My God!’»: The Theology of Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings – Robert F. Gross: The Gnostic Politics of The Red Devil Battery Sign – Robert Bray: Vieux Carré: Transferring «A Story of Mood» – Verna Foster: Waiting for Buddy, or Just Going on in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur – George W. Crandell: «I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow»: Tennessee Williams and the Representations of Time in Clothes for a Summer Hotel – Norma Jenckes: «Let’s Face the Music and Dance»: Resurgent Romanticism in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real and Clothes for a Summer Hotel – James Fisher: «In My Leftover Heart»: Confessional Autobiography in Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear – Thomas Keith: A House Not Meant to Stand - Tennessee’s Haunted Last Laugh.