Title:
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Desire over Protest : Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams
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Desire over Protest: Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams examines
growing claims that Tennessee Williams is fundamentally, or in large part, a political
writer. Drawing on newly published texts from both ends of Williams's career, his prose
fiction, essays and unpublished manuscript material, this study uniquely charts the
writer's development from an apprenticeship influenced by the radical social drama of
the nineteen thirties, through the commercial successes of the nineteen forties and
fifties, to his most experimental late work. Unlike the books and articles that have
tackled separate aspects of Williams's writing within the broad area of politics, this
study is structured in chapters that combine mainstream ideology, homosexuality, race
and gender. Many of the texts analysed contain both overt and indirect references to
social conditions, discrimination, regimes and the ethics of America's foreign policy,
but these are ultimately of secondary concern. Though Williams presented himself as a
revolutionary instinctively allied to a leftist politics, his writing privileges private
relationships, the power struggles that are, or emerge from, sexual encounters. The
resulting vision is one of fractured communities, of individuals selfishly pursuing lines
of desire that are self-destructive or, increasingly and conversely, just a mode of
survival. As Robert F. Gross reminds us, Williams's work assumes a liberal
individualist stance. Effectively, it deconstructs the tyranny and alienation of modern
life only to admit the impossibility of refashioning something more structurally
egalitarian and spiritually humane. Protest is diagnostic, not corrective; desire has
sovereignty
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