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Book Reviews 13 1 founded on the belief that order is more aesthetically pleasing than disorder and that the two are mutually exclusive, that it is instead capable of finding "order in chaos and chaos in order" (58), Demastes illustrates his concept of the theatre of chaos by analysing several dramatic texts. In addition to the two most obvious choices - Tom Stoppard's Hapgood. with its connection to Richard Feynman's lectures, and Arcadia. with its reliance on James Gleick's best-seller - his survey also addresses some less representative examples. from an interpretation of Willy Loman's quantum personality and an investigation of Hamlet's conscious choice between order, disorder, and orderly disorder, to a comparison between the characters' awareness of chaos in David Rabe's, Sam Shepard's, and Marsha Norman's drama. The book concludes with a look at Antonin Artaud and Tony Kushner, who both reject the "rationalist linear reirenchment" (156) typical of Western middle-class society and instead favour the idea of "[cjontrolled chaos" (151). Still, one cannot shake the impression that any other number of plays would serve Demastes's purpose just as well. The discussion of the so-called butterfly effect that the author presents in his analysis of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, for example, could be applied equally efficiently to many Greek tragedies , as well as to practically all of Georges Feydeau's vaudevilles. While this can, of course, mean that Demastes's method is a universal one, it could also suggest that, at least in some respects, his application of chaos theory does not accomplish much more than, say, Gustav Freytag's nineteenth-century Die Technik des Dramas [18631 with its notion of the triggering moment. When one adds to this Demastes's own admission that the notion of chaos as "a dynamic blending of disorder and order" is not particularly original and has already been known in some "premodern cultures" (xii), the methodological relevance of the whole endeavour becomes questionable. If all an application of chaos theory can do is to restate the already known with new terminology, the only heuristic value of such an attempt is in its curiosity. JURE GANTAR, DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY, HALIFAX PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Pelformance . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 286. $75.00. ALICE GRIFFIN. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia, South Carolina : University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 266. $29.95. ANNEITE J. SADDIK. The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999. Pp. 173ยท $33.50. The spate of books on Tennessee Wil1iams continues, and certain trends are now observable. A large - too large - number of recent publications have 132 BOOK REVIEWS addressed concerns of biography, bibliography, or critical reception without interpreting the texts themselves directly, or have been anthologies of essays by various scholars on narrow aspects of the lEuvre. As Alice Griffin notes (xi), there have been cornparatively few book-length studies recently that examine Williams's major plays in depth, either as literature or in performance . Philip Kolin's new anthology is an example of this trend. Expanding George Crandell's previous Greenwood collection, The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (1996), the Kolin volume casts a much wider net, combining work by eighteen scholars (several of whom deal with more than one area) that covers the critical, research, and performance history of twenty-five of Williams's seventy'plays, plus his fiction (novels as well as short stories), poetry, and films. Each of the twenty-two chapters includes a discussion of the biographical context of a work or group of writings; a survey of bibliographical history; an analysis of major critical approaches, which looks systematically at themes, characters, symbols, and plots; a consideration of the major critical problems posed by the work; an overview of chief productions and film and television versions; a concluding interpretation; and a bibliography of secondary sources. And the volume as a whole concludes with a selected general bibliography and three comprehensive indices. The usefulness of such a massive compendium is obvious; but it also has certain weaknesses and dangers , quite apart from the repetitions, the...

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