Overview

Tennessee Williams’s America is the first full-length study of homes, families, and familial exile in the plays of Tennessee Williams. The central argument of this book is that Williams’s vision of American life in his plays is predicated upon challenging the traditional idea of the home and family. Throughout his plays, the patriarchal space of the American home and family is shown to victimize and oppress two of society’s most marginalized groups: women and queer people; in Williams's plays, the experiences of one group often mirror and intersect with those of the other. From his earliest plays, such as Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind, to the masterpieces of his major phase, including Battle of Angels/Orpheus Descending, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Period of Adjustment, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, through to the much maligned but equally rich works of his late period, such as Vieux Carré and Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Williams depicts the home as a place which restricts and suffocates those who fail to perform their expected gender role in the wider patriarchal framework of American life. In its extended, full-length treatment of homes, families, and familial exiles in his theatrical output, this book adds a new perspective to Williams scholarship by examining the desperate and, at times, futile search for love, relationality, and belonging that his marginalized and alienated characters frequently pursue in alternative avenues of existence.

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9781032612331

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Reviews

“Honeini’s lucid and wide-ranging study cogently exposes both the tension between home and exile in Williams’s dramatic works and the concomitant victimisation of those most isolated by twentieth-century American conservatism: women and queer people” – Michael S. D. Hooper, author of Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire Over Protest (2012).

Author Information

Ahmed Honeini is an Honorary Research Associate in American Literature in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of two books - William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound (Routledge, 2021) and Tennessee Williams’s America: Homes, Families, Exiles (Routledge, 2025) – and the editor of Faulkner’s Transgressive Postmodernism, a special issue of The Faulkner Journal (2022). He is the founder of the Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network and co-Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies. He has work published or forthcoming on Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edgar Allan Poe. His research interests, broadly defined, lie in twentieth-century American fiction, theatre, and film.

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