Tennessee Williams: Paradoxes of Nonconformism and Genre Recreations

September 2011 issue of American Theater, celebrating the birth centenary of Tennessee Williams through a special section, mentions “original works” about the author continuously “being debuted” (27). Underlining the timelessness of Williams’s writings, the magazine talks of the “tallied up more than 100 works for the stage” through “rediscovery and rethinking” leading to the “survival of his dramatic oeuvre into the 21st century and beyond” (66 & 68). The enduring relevance of Williams’s writings and revisions cannot be bound to any spatial temporality. Many of his earlier unpublished drafts, sketches, revisions and full writings have been streaming through the successive issues of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review. The latest in this continuing series is ‘Crazy Night’, quite an autobiographical short story published in the 42nd issue (Spring 2014) of The Strand. In the newest biography of Tennessee Williams, John Lahr (2014) unearths many more layers of the author and his work. In her very recently published book, Annette J. Saddik (2015) takes up Williams’s “sixteen late plays” in the context of “a theatre of excess” and “Williams’ late aesthetic” to prove the open possibilities and avenues of fresh research on the author (p. 5). This book is a work of close analyses of Williams’s short fiction and drama in their continuously evolving forms and interrelationships through the methodology of in-depth textual analysis with critical insights from seasoned Tennessee Williams scholars. To quote Professor Amritjit Singh (Langston Hughes Professor of English at Ohio University, U.S.A.), from the Foreword, “Dr. Joshi’s book is an affirmation of the need to reexamine our relationship to the playwright and his creative output-just as the playwright examined, time and again, with poignancy and sensitivity, issues surrounding the individual’s relationship to social conventions and pressures.”