Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Recasting Genre In Tennessee Williams's Apprentice Plays, Christina Ilona Hunter

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates Tennessee Williams’s earliest full-length plays, also known as the apprentice plays—Candles to the Sun, Fugitive Kind, Not About Nightingales, Spring Storm, and Stairs to the Roof—by comparing, contrasting and contextualizing them in relation to Daniel Chandler’s generic criteria of drama; namely, narrative, characterization, setting, topics, iconography, and staging techniques. The present study also draws upon an extensive body of scholarship pertaining to genre theory, Williams’s cultural contemporaries, and the historical and psychological backdrop of Depression-era America. In these early plays, Williams diverged sharply from the dramatic generic conventions of his day, manipulating them in new …