AS Literature

Below is a list of useful Tennessee Williams websites (courtesy of eMagazine). Use these as part of your research into Williams - this addresses AO3 (other interpretations) and AO4 (Context):

http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/williams_tennessee/

The Mississippi Writers Page is just that. This page belongs to the University of Mississippi and is thus understandably thorough and useful. It provides a good biographical introduction followed by a detailed bibliography in addition to links to Internet film productions of Williams’ works. This site is a good starting point if nothing else, the many photographs making it an interesting site to browse.

http://hipp.gator.net/scarplaywrite.html

This site belongs to the Hippodrome State Theatre in Florida. Usually I bypass such sites, but this one was particularly detailed, providing biographical information and accounts of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Perspectives. It offers basic outlines of characters and setting, poetic references and
discussion topics.

www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/table.html

This site, entitled Perspectives in American Literature: A Research and Reference Guide, composed by Paul Reuben, has been included here because it offers a good oversight into the entire spectrum of American literature. Although the section on Tennessee Williams found in Chapter 8 is small, it does offer a detailed biography, an outline comparison of Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, and some useful study questions. Worth remembering this site for future reference.

www.etsu.edu/haleyd/index.htm

This and the following sites take a more scholarly approach and all are worth a look. This site belongs to Dr. Darryl E.Haley of the University of Alabama. Here you can read his dissertation, Certain Moral Values: A Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Although a very specific title, the subject matter appears to be interesting. The links on this page are also useful.

http://jackfritscher.com/tennessee

John Fritscher Ph.D. has produced this site containing his dissertation entitled Love and Death in Tennessee Williams. The site is well constructed, broken up into an introduction and six labelled chapters that one can dip in and out of. This attempts to place the works of TW into the broader picture of the ‘American Experience’. The themes of love and death are central to Williams’ works, particularly for A-Level study.

http://www.jackfritscher.com/Challenges_in_American_Culture.pdf

Fritscher has published a second of his works on this site, Popular Culture as Cyclic Phenomenon in the Evolution of Tennessee Williams. Worth a look but this is lengthy and challenging and not laid out well like his other site. Still, if you’re working along these lines yourself, there may be something here for you.