Tennessee-williams英.ppt

来自 : max.book118.com/html/2016/1123 发布时间：2021-03-26

Tennessee Williams (1911—1983), One of the most prominent playwrights in United States after World War II. Regarded as controversial and poetic, his plays write about the loneliness and isolation of modern man, revealing themes such as violence, frustrations, sex, even homosexuality. Many of Williams’s plays reflect the romantic Southern Tradition as is exemplified in the works William Faulkner and sexual freedom as in the novels of D.H. Lawrence. His characters are victims of having outlived the southern past in which they had been at home. Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911 and lived there with his family until he was seven. Thomas Lanier Williams, who became “Tennessee,” absorbed much of his creative material from this Mississippi home place. Despite the region’s industrial transformation, Williams always found the South his own. his major plays The Glass Menagerie (1945), Williams’s first major success, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), his second major play, won a Pulitzer Prize, and established him as an major American dramatist. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), also a Pulitzer Prize The Glass Menagerie Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. The “mad heroine” theme that appeared in many of his plays seemed clearly influenced by the life of Williams’ sister Rose, who spent most of her life in mental hospitals. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Amanda Wingfield was generally seen to represent Williams’ mother. Tom Wingfield was understood to represent Williams himself. In this “memory play” Tom Wingfield recalls his life in St. Louis with his mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle, and his sister Laura, withdrawn and slightly crippled girl who collects glass animal figures. In this as well as in Williams’s other major works, a sense of doom hangs over the characters. Women, portrayed often with great sympathy, are at th