Gustav von Aschenbach Goes to the Movies: Thomas Mann in the Joy Rio Stories of Tennessee Williams
1997; International Fiction Association; Volume: 24; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0315-4149
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoTennessee Williams's short story The Mysteries of the Joy Rio, written in 1941 at the very beginning of his career before he was known at all as a playwright, appears to have held a particular fascination for the writer, for he returned to the material twelve years later, writing a second story, Hard Candy (1953), set in the same cinema and with a similar theme. Surprisingly, he did not consider Hard Candy simply as a revision of the earlier story, but as an independent work. The following year, in 1954, Williams published a collection of short stories, taking Hard Candy as the name for the volume as a whole, but placing the earlier Mysteries of the Joy Rio as the final story in the collection. An editor's note (although no editor is identified) calls the stories variations on the same theme, although in result. Both stories are set in the run-down cinema called the Joy Rio and both concern elderly men who haunt the cinema in search of sex with other men. In somewhat different ways the two stories show clear evidence of the texts as reworkings of material drawn from two works by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912) and Tonio Kroger (1903).
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