Introduction: I am a Fugitive: Homes, Families, and Exiles in the Plays of Tennessee Williams, 1936-1981
1. An Illusion of Escape: Monotony, Stasis, and Freedom in Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind
2. To Go on Living: Death, Sex, and Procreation in Battle of Angels/Orpheus Descending and The Rose Tattoo
3. Occupants of a Sinking Cage: Heteronormativity and the Politics of Marriage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Period of Adjustment
4. Organs of a Body, Torn Out: The Violence of Exile in Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth
5. Into the World: Queer Life Beyond the Periphery in Vieux Carré and Something Cloudy, Something Clear
Coda: A Vagabond’s Paradise: Snapshots of the American Family after Williams
Biography
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.
“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)
"Honeini examines all of Williams’s plays, reminding us of the rich diversity and popularity of Williams’s work across his career and dispelling stubborn misconceptions about the quality of his creative output on either side of his 'major plays.’ This book will be cited in every study of Tennessee Williams for decades to come.”
--Michael P. Bibler, author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (2009)
“Honeini’s new volume provides provocative trains of thought, especially regarding the effects of homophobia, and if read carefully it rewards one with nuggets of original, insightful, and sometimes defiant readings of Williams’s texts through a queer lens.”
--Jef Hall-Flavin, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review (2026)
“Tennessee Williams’s America: Homes, Families, Exiles is a skillfully written, meticulously researched volume that demands a permanent place on the shelves of theater scholars and Williams enthusiasts alike”.
-- Mourad Romdhani, Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT)
